


Miscreant

by bananacheerio



Category: Hunger Games Series - All Media Types, Hunger Games Trilogy - Suzanne Collins, The Hunger Games (Movies)
Genre: 60th Hunger Games, District 3 (Hunger Games), Gen, lots of character deaths
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-08-26
Updated: 2021-03-01
Packaged: 2021-03-06 21:42:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 28
Words: 66,017
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26115886
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bananacheerio/pseuds/bananacheerio
Summary: The 60th Hunger Games have arrived, and District Three has little to no hope for a win when fourteen-year-old Pixel Delaroux, one of ten children and a poor factory girl, is reaped as the newest female tribute.Pixel, however, has no intention of actually going into the arena. Her history of petty crimes and easy escapes is going to make sure of that.But the Capitol is an entirely different monster, one that District Three has not quite prepared her for. Pixel’s road to freedom is obstructed in every direction, be it Peacekeepers, Gamemakers, other tributes, even her own mentors. Should the worst happen, and Pixel ends up in the arena itself, she knows that it would mean her certain doom.
Comments: 80
Kudos: 22





	1. Chapter 1

Pixel Delaroux was woken in the dead of night by the screeching of a toddler. She was woken again, two hours later, by the sounds of retching in the bathroom. Her final wake-up was her mother, reaching across to her and her closest sister, shaking them awake softly while clutching their two-year-old brother to her breast.

“It’s time,” she muttered to the two of them, and Pixel could barely blink her eyes open to make out her mother’s red hair and slight frame before she’d left the room. 

It didn’t take much to get the two girls out of bed. Vista, at thirteen, tended to be up earlier than her sister, who was only one year older, on a daily basis. And with eight other children and teenagers making noises of distress and anxiety this particular morning, Pixel was easily sliding out from under the blanket immediately after her.

The blouse and skirt her mother had laid out for this year’s Reaping were hand-me-downs, just as all of her clothes were, and there was a slight yellow stain Pixel noticed on the fabric of the top. Not that she minded, as her attention was diverted by three of her brothers running in and out of the room while they yelled at each other.

The chaos was typical of Reaping morning. Pixel’s oldest sister, Coda, was finally relieved from her own personal burden and anxieties about the Games after turning nineteen three months earlier, and was tucking in clothes, fixing out-of-place hairs, holding hands. On the other hand, India, most at risk at age seventeen, was combing her fingers through her long brown hair, her face remaining an unhealthy gray while strands of hair tangled in her fingernails. Pixel could only assume she’d been the one to get sick earlier this morning.

Pixel stood to the side as she watched the morning unfold, just as she always did. She knew she’d have been in the way if she tried to help. No breakfast sat on the table; usually there would have been some scant bowls of oatmeal, maybe with some pickles or fried potato skins if they were lucky. Instead, their ramshackle oven ran at a low temperature, cooking a turkey for the family to eat in celebration should all of the children walk free from the ceremony. If a kid was Reaped, Pixel figured, it would probably be eaten in some form or other anyway. It would be a crime to waste that much food, though it might be turned into a soup or stew. Much more somber than a fresh turkey leg.

There were four children in the household that would be up for Reaping in this year’s Hunger Games. The possibility that one of the ten Delaroux kids would be Reaped one day was always sitting in the minds of the family members like a pervasive sickness. It felt to Pixel, on occasion, like long, long ago, when high fatality rates for children prompted parents to have as many kids as possible. The more kids, the higher the chance a few would make it to adulthood. The Delarouxs had already gotten one through the trials of teenagedom; what were the chances of all ten making it?

The three brothers ran back out of the bedroom and passed Pixel while she grabbed a comb to brush through her red hair. They’d be leaving soon, she figured, considering the trip would take at least half an hour. Her mother reappeared, sans two-year-old, as if to validate that thought, and tilted her head towards the door.

Pixel Delaroux adored her mother, but had questioned the need for so many children ever since Canta, the eighth, was born. It was tradition in her family- her father was one of seven, and her mother one of twelve- but in a location with little wealth or food to go around, it seemed irresponsible. Pixel herself had decided at a young age that she was most likely never getting married or having children of her own; someone like her didn’t have the time to deal with boys or small children. And Pixel knew she’d gotten her brains and cunning from her mother, who would sometimes sneak her middle daughter treats when the others weren’t looking in exchange for her good behavior and quiet demeanor. Just why her mother had given up that potential to raise ten children had always been beyond her.

“Come on, Pix,” Mrs. Delaroux said quietly, the ever-present exhaustion seeping through her voice. “Let’s get this over with.”

16-year-old Rom, Pixel’s most immediate older brother, rushed out the door to grab the hands of the youngest two and keep them from wandering off. Her father was in the back, comforting India through her usual tangle of nerves, and the middle children had all finally seemed to have learned from Pixel. Make yourself easy and quiet, and life would follow suit.

Coda was easing Canta and Page out the door, and finally all ten Delaroux children were on their way to the center of the district, their routine parade of skinny, pale children drawing the usual amount of attention.

Vista, Pixel’s closest sibling both in age and personality, caught up to her sister and mother and grabbed Pixel’s hand before whispering to her. “I’m scared it’s going to be India this year. Since we had to take out more tesserae."

Pixel took a deep breath and looked back at her sister, whose chestnut hair was held back in clips but still managing to fly away from her face. Vista was almost as much of a worrier as India was. She seemed, however, to be easily calmed by being physically close to her older sister, who had a notoriously steady and calm demeanor.

“The odds for the two of us aren’t all that different from her, Vist,” Pixel answered bluntly. Steady and calm, but not willing to beat around any bushes. “But if you think about it, Coda had the worst of it and she’s safe now. I don’t see why it would change for India. Or us.”

Pixel used her free hand to comb her red hair away from her face. She was one of only two Delaroux children with the fiery locks, the other being 11-year-old Linus, and while she liked the color, she was often annoyed with its ostentatiousness. It was much more difficult to get away with stuff when strangers could recognize you from a mile away, and there were some stalls at the market that had permanently banned her due to previous “incidents” and the identifiable color of her hair.

It wasn’t _her_ fault that she was often hungry and their stalls were easily picked from.

The train system in District Three was considered one of Panem’s miracles, and it was a running joke that it was bound to collapse at any second, but it was what many people were still using to get to and from their factory workplaces. Pixel, Vista, and the other three older children all took it daily to their after-school jobs in the factories, so the Delaroux family was more than familiar with its usage. The twelve members of the family piled onto the loaded train car, and it set off, Pixel holding tight to the metal bar for a while and only shuffling occasionally to let more people in at further stops. Upon reaching the center of the district, Mr. Delaroux announced to the kids that they were to get off and follow him carefully, being sure not to get separated.

Pixel squeezed Vista’s hand, feeling the nerves begin to set in. They liked to make fun of India for her propensity for anxiety, but it was always tense when they approached the large, crowded park to check in for the Reaping, and even Pixel couldn’t hold back some semblance of unease.

Lael Lu, the escort from Three who was now in her third year on the job, was already on stage, chatting with the mayor of the district. From the way she was excitedly talking and gesturing, she was probably hoping for a repeat of the excitement of last year’s reaping. A girl had volunteered to take the place of her sickly twin sister, and it was about as riveting as reapings got. Pixel remembered being thankful she’d been standing far away from that whole mess. With all the attention on the two girls and none on her, she had managed to snag a couple of coins from the pocket of a girl in a well-known merchant family.

This year, Lael stood out against the tall brick and steel buildings of the District with a bright yellow dress, much more simply designed than most Capitol fashions. A large yellow flower was clipped to the side of her head and she wore hot pink lipstick. If she weren’t so glaringly clean, her black hair so shiny in the sun it almost gave off a reflection, she might have been able to blend in as simply an eccentric District member. She stood on a dilapidated stage in the center of the District’s only park that was free of shacks and homeless tents, the stage itself grand and metal and broken, and near her were the Mayor of the District, who was a tired-looking woman in her fifties, and the four remaining Victors from District Three.

Those of Reaping age were directed to stand with other kids in their age group, and Pixel and Vista were close enough in age that they could remain holding hands as they walked into the roped-off area of the park, herded like cattle preparing to be slaughtered. Pixel shook her head, trying to erase that visual. There was little to no chance she’d be chosen, based solely on the sheer number of people in the district and the poverty that was rampant here. As was her usual calming technique, she began running numbers in her head. At nearly 200,000 people, District Three was the third most populous behind Six and Two. The chances were minute.

Pixel had to keep telling herself that, if only to keep herself calm for her sister’s sake.

“Welcome!” Lael’s bright voice piped into the microphone, looking gleefully around the town square. “Happy Hunger Games! You know what they say, may the odds be ever in your favor!”

Lael was young; she couldn’t have been older than her early to mid twenties. And being so bright, so unbothered by the fanfare of death surrounding her, made her seem young enough to be Pixel’s age. The difference between her and someone like Coda, who was younger than the escort, felt almost jarring. And the way she spoke, with that lilted Capitol accent, would have been easy to make fun of if she didn’t speak of such grim happenings.

“I’m so excited to show everyone the new video for this year!” she exclaimed. “They made it specially for you, so be sure to listen up, ok?”

The screens that had been propped up around the park lit up, and President Snow’s voice filled the area as two Peacekeepers rolled out the bowls filled with names.

“ _The Treaty stated that every year, each District would give a boy and a girl to fight to the death in an arena, to bring glory to their home…_ ”

Pixel and Vista turned and whispered to each other as the video began, not minding it much. It was best not to listen, they had learned when they were younger and standing in the wings. The two of them had spent so many years watching and hoping for their older siblings to make it out safely that they became accustomed to ignoring the pomp and circumstance around the Reaping in order to ease their anxieties. 

The televisions grew silent, and Lael smiled out to the crowd again. “Ok, you know we always go ladies first, so let’s pick our lucky young lady from Three, shall we?”

The girls, meanwhile, continued whispering to each other. Better to chat about what was for lunch, or what school work they had due in a few days. Pixel wasn’t paying attention, and the escort was picking a name out of the bowl, and reading a name out loud.

And Pixel perked up at the sound of her own name. 

And then she saw Lael standing on stage, holding a slip of paper. Vista’s face went stark white. The District girls crowded around them, turning their heads with a mixture of sadness and relief. Pixel’s heart sank into her stomach and she paused.

“Pixel Delaroux, come on up!” Lael called out again.

 _Oh no._

She took a step, and pulled a deep breath in, and out. But she wasn’t panicking. Pixel’s mind began to race with strategies, ways she could talk herself out of this, escape plans. The Peacekeeper making his way towards her had a front pocket with something inside, and as he took another step Pixel feigned being pushed against him, sneaking her finger into the pocket and snagging a keyring. As the Peacekeeper shoved her back the other way, she slipped the ring with a small silver key on it into her own skirt pocket. Perhaps this was a key to some room in the Justice Building, if she had any luck on her side. And perhaps she could sneak out the back, bid goodbye to District Three, find a way to sneak her closest siblings to refuge with her.

Pixel walked towards the stage, running through potential ideas in her mind. Could she escape off the train? Climb out the window of the Justice Building? Slide away in the middle of the chaos in the Capitol and begin a long walk home? 

And suddenly, she was hitting the steps up to the stage, and it hit _her_ that she was on camera. Pixel held her head up in realization and joined Lael, allowing a smile to creep onto her face. Only kids who knew they were going to die cried on this stage. Only kids who knew they would be tributes in the arena felt hopelessness. 

She would escape, somehow. But for now, it was best to let the Capitol see a cute, charming young girl take the stage. Pixel Delaroux was not a factory worker or a pickpocket or a miscreant, no. She was a 14-year-old kid who was simply _thrilled_ to get to finally experience the luxury of the Capitol.


	2. Chapter 2

Peacekeepers guarded every corner of the Justice Building, which was the first thing that started to incite panic in Pixel’s small body. She dipped her right hand into her pocket to fiddle with the small silver key she’d taken from the Peacekeeper, wondering if by any miracle she’d be able to use it to get herself out of this new prison.

The building was not a high-rise, unlike most other buildings in the center of District Three. Bordered on the east by a large lake, and in every other direction by endless wheat fields that stretched into District Nine and others, Three was home to a large population, mostly shoved into small apartments all stacked on top of one another. Pixel’s family lived far enough south that her neighborhood was mostly single-family brick houses, tall and thin and squished together.

The Justice Building, on the other hand, was sprawling and grand, a product of an older time. When Pixel and her newly reaped district partner, an older boy named Cable, were shoved inside, the teenagers stood in awe for a couple of seconds before being immediately pulled down into the basement, and into separate rooms on opposite sides of the staircase.

Pixel’s room was sterile and uncomfortable, with no windows and the only door out being the one guarded by Peacekeepers. There were empty shelves on every wall, dust now piled where there seemed to have been important items in the past, and Pixel carefully touched the surfaces, examining to see if there was some kind of secret door, any kind of escape. But there was nothing, and she seemed to be destined to stand there until her family could come say their goodbyes.

And when the goodbyes came, Pixel seemed to be the only one without tears.

Her father, tall and strong with a thick brown beard and ashen skin, swept her up into a hug, picking her up off the ground, which her mother joined in.

“It’s ok, you’ll be ok,” he muttered into her ear, though it seemed to be more for his own benefit than hers. Her mother repeated the sentiment, giving her shoulders a squeeze. And then they set her down amongst her siblings.

All nine moved in tightly, crying and squeezing and hoping for one last hug with their sister. India was sobbing uncontrollably, apologizing for not volunteering but she’d been frozen where she stood and she hadn’t been able to speak. As if Pixel had expected someone to volunteer for her.

“No, no no,” Pixel shook her head as she grasped her sister’s arms. “Don’t say that. Nobody should ever volunteer. Not for this thing, not when you’re needed at home.”

And when most had gotten their hugs in and sobbed to Pixel and told them how much they loved her, they were already beginning to be pried away by the Peacekeepers. Pixel grabbed onto Vista to pull her back, to whisper one last sentiment into her ear.

“I’m not going into that arena,” she muttered. Vista’s brows furrowed together, and she opened her mouth to speak but Pixel interrupted. “I’m going to find a way out. I’m going to escape. If I’m presumed dead, I’m not. I’m coming back home and I’m taking you and whoever else will come. They’re not sending me in.”

“Pixel, that’s-” Vista started before being jerked back by a white glove. She stopped talking and simply nodded.

It was another twenty minutes of sitting alone in this empty room- Pixel figured it must have been used to house exhibits or artifacts of some kind in the past- before she was pulled back out and walked across the street, down a flight of stairs, and into an underground train station. This wasn’t usually where passenger trains came in; Pixel had been in here once before during work at the factory, when they’d sent her out to help with bringing in a material shipment. The train then had been large and black and bulky, meant to pull in lumber from District Seven and coal from District Twelve.

This time, the train that was awaiting the duo was sleek, silver, and shiny, as if the exterior had been freshly polished and the windows recently washed. Pixel stepped aboard, wanting to be able to settle in after all of this pushing and pulling her around. Cable followed.

Her district partner was a boy about India’s age, though he must have attended a different school because Pixel did not recognize him upon his reaping. Cable Cho was a tall, scrawny kid whose handshake had given Pixel a bit of an icky feeling with how weak and clammy it was. She couldn’t blame the guy for being a ball of nerves; unlike her, he’d actually be going into the arena to fight to the death. She did hope the best for the guy, for both his sake and the District’s. The last time a District Three tribute had won, Pixel was two years old. Coda, who at seven was the only sibling able to remember, used to like to brag about the year they had food on the table constantly and celebrations once a month. Wiress Neville had been a local hero and Coda would recount watching that glorious moment of her victory play out live on screen when she felt like giving out a good story.

Wiress was no longer exactly considered a hero, being known as a bit of an odd duck around the District more than anything nowadays. Her win with the use of cunning and the technology available in the arena became something of legend, and people remembered her more as the seventeen-year-old who had outsmarted everyone in the arena and less as the woman in her late-twenties who preferred time alone and would sing and talk to herself out loud.

Pixel had always assumed that the woman would be out on the streets homeless if not for her win. That impression did not change when she boarded the train. Wiress seemed to be shivering, though it was mid-summer, and humming herself a tune while Beetee, the notorious genius of the mentors remaining from Three, rubbed her shoulder gently.

There were three victors besides Wiress and Beetee that had come from District Three thus far. One had been the winner of the seventh Games, though nobody knew his name or even if he was still alive, as seemed to be the case for all victors from the tenth Games and earlier.

Amity Homewood, having been confined to a wheelchair since her win of the seventeenth Games, looked much older than she actually was. Pixel had been told the woman couldn’t have been older than sixty, but her hunched figure and gray hair made her think that the victor would be toppling over dead any second. And then there was Sinclair Boone.

Pixel was embarrassed in blushing when she saw him enter the train, assisting Amity with the ramp. Sinclair was in his mid-thirties, a bachelor with jet black hair and a scruffy beard to go with his dark olive complexion. He was the subject of the crushes of many girls (and, to be frank, boys) Pixel’s age and she was kidding herself if she didn’t admit that he was strikingly handsome. But handsome didn’t get Pixel out of this mess, and as the doors to the train closed she felt herself searching frantically for an exit, her eyes scanning the car for any and every door, window, or loose floorboard available.

“Can we go into other cars on the train?” she asked into the ether as she stepped forward. The one they were in now was shiny and new, glinting in the fluorescent lights with fresh mahogany furniture and silver carafes and glasses sitting on the side tables. This seemed to be a lounge area, though there was a table fully set for a meal on the far side.

“Oh yes! Of course!” a peppy voice sounded from behind Pixel. She whipped her head around to see Lael closing up the door behind her. The mentors regarded the young woman with amusement, as if she was a puppy rather than a complicit Capitol citizen.

“You both have rooms in the sleeping car, even though we’re supposed to arrive tonight,” she continued. “But if you want to take a moment to change or freshen up before we arrive I’m sure that would be an excellent idea!”

Pixel nodded and took a step forward before feeling the train lurch into motion. She stumbled for a second and grabbed onto the nearest chair, turning her head as the car began speeding forward. In an instant they were pulled into the sunlight as the train left the underground station. Suddenly, the interior of the train was even shinier, every polished surface sparkling with glamour. It was something of the likes Pixel had never seen before, and she was stopped in her tracks for a few seconds before proceeding forward to the door to the next car.

Pulling the door open, Pixel smiled as she was met with sunlight and fresh air; the platform to get to the next car was an open space, if only about a foot wide. Excellent. She could climb to the top of the train and jump when the time was right, or even just take off now if she wanted. Sure, she’d have to jump from a moving train, but she could handle the couple of scrapes and bruises that would lend to her. She tilted her head to the right, taking in her surroundings and deciding if right now was the moment. Before anyone noticed she was gone, while they all could assume she was in her sleeper car.

“You see that?”

Pixel nearly jumped out of her skin as a voice sounded, accompanying the opening of the train door behind her. She grabbed the handle to the door to the sleeper car and turned her head to see Beetee, smiling softly and pointing mid-air. He was about the same age as her parents, with a goatee and square-rimmed glasses. Pixel’s father had told her they’d gone to school together as kids- now his own two children were in the same school as Pixel and her siblings- and he had been the smartest in their class. According to her dad, his win hadn’t been much of a surprise.

Pixel squinted, trying to see what he was pointing at, but couldn’t make it out, so she shook her head.

“It’s a force field,” he told her softly. “To keep tributes from jumping. Just a little fun fact. Were you having trouble opening the door to the car?”

Pixel’s face turned pink as she realized she’d been caught already. But Beetee seemed kind, and hadn’t pressed her on her obvious attempt, so she simply stuck out her hand towards the open air. Sure enough, it hit something that gave her a small electric shock back, and she pulled her hand back in surprise.

“Weird,” she said softly to herself.

“Well, I was hoping for a little better than ‘weird’, considering it’s one of my newer creations,” Beetee pushed his glasses up the bridge of his nose a little higher. “Of course it was developed with a team in the Capitol, but I certainly helped. Now let’s get you back in the train.”

Pixel felt her heart drop a tad. This was the most obvious choice for her escape, of course they would have covered their bases here.

“Can I turn around?” she asked. “I, um… changed my mind. I’ll look at the sleeper car later.”

Beetee nodded empathetically and stepped to the side to let his tribute back in.

Cable had taken one of the dinner chairs and perched himself precariously on the edge, as if someone was going to yell at him at any moment that the seat had been reserved. Amity had parked her wheelchair by a window and was watching the edge of District Three roll by, while Wiress and Sinclair had taken spots on a sofa.

“Ah!” Beetee clapped his hands together and reached for a steaming carafe. “I see they’ve heated up some water for us, and they’ve given us your favorite tea, Wiress. Who wants a cup?”

Wiress held her hand up. “Yes, please. Thank you.”

Sinclair grinned at her and leaned forward in his seat. “You know I’m not really one for tea, Beetee. But if it’ll help our honored guests, I’ll gladly help hand it out. Pixel? Cable? Looks like it’s peppermint.”

“Um, no thanks,” Pixel had to keep herself from wrinkling her nose at the thought. Mint grew out of control in her family’s garden, and mint tea was something they tended to only have when times were really rough. She could no longer separate the fresh herb from the feeling of hunger. Instead, she grabbed an apple off the nearest table. “Can I have one of these?”

“Can you have one!?” Sinclair repeated loudly, clapping his hands together and chuckling at Pixel. “Honey, this is all for you. You can eat every bit of food here, smash the water glasses, throw knives at the walls. Whatever makes you feel prepared for meeting the Capitol tonight.”

Pixel took a bite, cringing internally at the idea of “meeting the Capitol”. She supposed there was always coverage of the tributes leaving their trains, meeting the press for the first time, making an entrance. First impressions were big. She wondered if all the hubbub would be enough to distract the crowd from her swift and quiet exit.

“Now,” Beetee walked back into the train car and sat himself in a comfortable armchair, where he picked up a remote control and clicked a button towards the window nearest the dining table. The window darkened, and in its place a television screen lit up. “Might as well get this part out of the way. I don’t think all of the Reapings have finished yet, but we can certainly take a look at what our two fighters are up against.”

“Oh, let’s not,” Wiress piped up, her voice soft and trembling. Her dark hair tumbled over her shoulder in a frizzled braid, half undone by her picking strands out of it. “I don’t like it.”

“You don’t have to watch,” Beetee told her gently. “But I see something in these two-”

He turned his head towards Pixel and gave her a wink.

“-and I think it’s only fair to them that they’re given a fighting chance,” he clicked another button on the remote and it lit up with a mountain scene.

District One’s Reaping was in the middle of a square that was surrounded by snow-capped mountains, even in the middle of July. The luxury district, which Pixel could only assume was somewhere in the north of the country, had much more fanfare than there had been in Three. The Reapings were lined up differently- there stood one boy and one girl at the front of both crowds: Career tributes waiting for the opportunity to volunteer.

Pixel bit her lip as she watched what she knew would unfold. It had been shown on camera every year she could remember for Districts One, Two, and Four. The escort for One, an androgynous Capitolite with bright green hair and so much makeup they barely looked human, pulled a name out of the first bowl. A small girl with brown hair walked up, a smirk on her face as if this whole process was laughable. She was right, after all, as the girl at the front of the crowd quickly raised her arm to take her spot.

This girl, the volunteer, was lithe and muscular, with the build of a dancer. She was introduced to the crowd- to the world- as Miriam Opal, and gave the cameras a devious smile, as if she knew she already had the Games in her pocket.

The boy, who stood about a foot taller than Miriam but had similar blonde hair, followed the same ritual. And tributes and mentors alike in the District Three car tensed as he introduced himself as Praxis, Praxis Opal. Twin brother of Miriam.


	3. Chapter 3

“That can’t be allowed!” Amity called out from her wheelchair. “Siblings in the Games? What are they thinking?”

Pixel furrowed her brows and turned her head to her mentors, who were watching the screen with various levels of disbelief. A pair of siblings had never gone into the Games together before. It was fairly obvious why; even Career families would want the opportunity for every single child of theirs to come out of the arena.

“It’s a built-in alliance,” Sinclair said. Pixel wasn’t born when he’d gone into the arena, but it was said that he’d won through his connections to other tributes and to the Capitolites he’d charmed. “Nobody will trust each other more than a pair of twins. Every Career alliance stumbles at the same point every Games, but these two…”

Pixel understood. These two would never distrust one another. They’d stay together until they were the only two left standing. It would never be a one-on-one fight against them.

Cable’s face had turned even paler white, his skin ashy and drained, and he stood up from the table. “I’m going to watch the rest from my sleeper car. Alone.”

Beetee nodded understandingly and pointed him towards the direction of the bedrooms.

Pixel knotted her fingers together nervously, trying to keep an even face as the screen flickered to the next District. It didn’t even matter, right? She had to think to herself. She was escaping. She wouldn’t be going into the arena, she didn’t have to think about fighting that scary duo. Pixel drew a deep breath in and plastered her eyes to the screen. 

The Reaping in District Two was held in an amphitheater dug down into existing rock, the teenagers crowding the seats surrounding their escort, while parents and the rest of the district watched screens outside. The district was mountainous, like One, though Pixel saw no snow on their mountains, and it seemed a much drier and more arid climate. Like District One, two pre-selected teenagers sat in the front seats, ready to volunteer their names for the death match.

Petra was the name the girl gave. She was tall and strong, and her muscles could be clearly seen through a strategic sleeveless dress. Her demeanor was calm, almost brooding, and she never gave a smile.

The boy was named Urban, and compared to the other Careers that had been Reaped so far he seemed by far to be the most charming. As he volunteered, he smiled and joked with the escort, taking his time up on the stage and giving a salute to the cameras. Before he could face his district partner, one of the many District Two victors who were seated at the back of the stage (there had to be at least ten of them) stood and rushed over to the boy, drawing him in with a large hug. 

“Ah, the Fonseca dynasty continues,” Beetee remarked dryly. “Must be Teo’s son.”

“Teo?” Pixel asked, tilting her head back to her mentor.

“Victor from the year before I won,” Beetee explained, pointing at the bald man who was now taking his seat. “There have been four Hunger Games victors from the Fonseca family in District Two. You’ll probably remember Rune, who won a couple of years ago. I imagine that’s his cousin.”

Pixel nodded in understanding. Rune Fonseca of District Two had taken home an easy title her first Reaping year, in a hilly arena that had more boulders than greenery. The boy from Three that year had been a friend of her brother Rom’s, and she remembered him watching in agony as Rune smashed the boy’s head into a boulder.

She gulped as she imagined what his cousin would be able to do to her if given the chance.

But Urban took the hand of his sulky district partner and waved charmingly to the cameras, as if he was on a talent show rather than a fight to the death. And then the screens changed once again, and this time a familiar scene appeared, with Lael standing on stage in her bright yellow dress, surprisingly tame compared to the last two escorts that had been on their screen. 

District Three certainly looked much more urban compared to the last two, even though the Reaping was taking place in a park, and the high rises that held many of their factories stood like pillars in the distance. This was what Pixel paid attention to as she heard her own name called out once again. The only time she allowed herself to look at her own image was as she took the stage, and she felt surprisingly satisfied with how happy she seemed to be when she walked up into the spotlight.

“Fabulous job, by the way,” Sinclair spoke up. “Sponsors love a wide-eyed cute kid. It’ll be a great underdog act. Did you actually stumble against that Peacekeeper?”

Her little ruse of pickpocketing the Peacekeeper had managed to seem more clumsy than calculated on camera, and she felt a pang of guilt that someone had seen through it. Pixel shook her head. She didn’t want to lie to Sinclair, or any of her mentors, more than she had to, so she dug into her pocket and pulled out the small silver key, hanging alone on a single keyring.

Suddenly, Sinclair erupted in laughter. He clapped his large, tan hands together, which seemed to startle Wiress. She grabbed a throw pillow and held it close to her body.

“Brilliant!” he chortled, then turned to a confused-looking Amity. “We’ve got a little thief on our hands! Did you manage to take anything else from the bastard?”

“No,” Pixel shook her head again, this time smiling. “I mean, I was just looking for one thing. And this key ended up being useless, since there weren’t any available exits in the Justice Building but… I mean, I can bring in a token from home with me, right?”

Beetee squinted his eyes at her through his glasses, then raised an eyebrow. It occurred to Pixel that she had now admitted to an escape attempt after Beetee had already caught her in the middle of another. That made two in the course of an hour. But he said nothing.

“Taking some Peacekeeper’s house key with you into the arena,” Sinclair was still laughing as he stood up and walked toward his tribute. He put a hand on her head, as if to ruffle her hair. “I like this one.”

Pixel, unsure how to respond, simply smiled, shockingly loving the amount of attention being doted upon her by these mentors who had no other choice. It was enough to distract from the smiling faces of the District Four tributes on the screen next to her, the final Careers to be entering the arena. 

The group watched in silence as the rest of the Reapings were played one by one. There was the girl from Five, who had large glasses and seemed distracted by the looming bad weather in her district. The boy from Seven, older and visibly angry and pulling back from the Peacekeepers when he could. The girl from Ten, who, like Pixel, seemed to be waving and smiling at the cameras as if her life depended on it. The girl from Eleven, quiet and dignified, staring ahead unbreakingly. 

It became apparent, as the boy from Twelve was announced and took the stage, his jaw set while he stared at the ground rather than the cameras, that this was a group of older tributes. Unless one or two of them simply looked far older than they were, Pixel would be the youngest tribute of the 60th Hunger Games.

Amity was the one to vocalize it. 

“Oh the Capitol will love you dearly, darling,” she announced. “Youngest tributes are always the sweethearts of Panem.”

Pixel bit her lip, trying not to quip back that sure, they were sweethearts. But they didn’t win the Hunger Games. The smaller tributes were always doted on, sent plenty of gifts early in the Games, adored by Capitolites. But when it came down to a fight to the death, there was little to no hope for any of them.

But Pixel didn’t want to refute Amity, who seemed to have convinced herself that her tribute was going to be absolutely set for the duration of the Games. 

Somehow, she hadn’t noticed Lael had exited the train car until the escort came bursting back in. She was looking vaguely stressed, though Pixel didn’t pay much mind to it, and turned to her younger tribute. 

“I’ve laid out some clothes for you, if you want to wear them,” Lael told her. “It’s your choice, I just noticed the stain on your shirt and figured if you wanted to change but didn’t know what to wear…”

“Thanks, Lael,” Sinclair spoke, still standing next to Pixel. “I think that’s a good idea.”

Sinclair moved his hand to Pixel’s shoulder and gently led her out of the car, and into the next, which consisted of a long hallway and two bedrooms off to the side. The door was closed to the first, and Pixel assumed that Cable had taken up residence there already from the soft sobs permeating through the door.

Inside the second, on the bed, lay a blouse with bright yellow sunflowers- obviously a Lael choice- a white skirt, some hot pink sandals, a white paperboy cap, and large, chunky pink earrings. Pixel wrinkled her nose as she picked up one of the earrings.

“Uh, my ears aren’t pierced,” she told Sinclair, trying to hide her disdain. He took the earring from her, along with its partner, and put it away in a drawer, then grabbed the cap and the sandals to put away, too.

“Too much,” he shook his head before taking a step back and leaning against the doorframe. “You ok, kid?”

Pixel looked up at him and bit her lip. Should she tell him that she was totally fine, that she knew she wasn’t actually going into the arena? Then again, the consequences of that would certainly be something to figure out. She’d be a fugitive for at least a couple of years, though she’d have no problem with cutting off all her hair and dying it black or something. Not to mention she’d be hitting her growth spurt soon, which would hopefully make her more unrecognizable. But if they found out someone like Sinclair knew that those were her plans beforehand...

“I think so,” Pixel answered, pushing her plans to the back of her brain. She’d actually have to manage an escape first. “I don’t know… I feel like it would be more normal to cry, but I’m not that kind of person, I guess.”

“Listen,” Sinclair answered, crossing his burly arms. He wore a simple blue button-down with sleeves that he’d rolled up to the elbows, and his arms were covered in thick, black hair. “I know it’s hard to open up when there’s a whole team of people out there trying to keep you alive. And it might feel like a lot of pressure in addition to basic survival. But I want to know what you’ve got. There’s something there. Not everyday a kid can get away with stealing from a Peacekeeper on national television.”

“I’m just a factory kid,” Pixel answered quickly. She’d never considered herself humble in her own mind, but it was always easier to make people like you if you were at least a little self-deprecating. “My family’s poor, I didn’t really have a choice.”

“Don’t pull that shit,” Sinclair lifted a hand and mindlessly stroked his beard. “I know girls especially like to play down their own talents, and I want to hear all of it. What factory? What do you know how to do?”

“Tablets and touch screens,” Pixel replied, taking a seat on the edge of the bed. “Um, they taught us coding, and how to put that stuff together.”

She paused a second, then decided that Sinclair clearly didn’t mind her misdeeds.

“My sister and I would steal stuff sometimes,” Pixel admitted with a shrug. “Actually, at home we made our own tablets out of the stolen materials. They were only useful for games that we already knew how to install on Capitol tablets, but-”

“Excellent!” Sinclair exclaimed. “I love this. I can work with this. I am…”

He looked down at the clothes that remained laid out on the bed. 

“I’m going to let you get changed. Your current shoes are fine,” he noted. “We won’t be in the Capitol until late tonight, so you can hang out here if you want. But the mentors will be hanging out in the lounge car if you want to come talk strategy. Your choice.”

Sinclair left the room, and Pixel was truly alone for the first time in her life.


	4. Chapter 4

Pixel guessed it was roughly midnight when the train arrived in the Capitol. She had laid in her bed alone for about half an hour before deciding that it was too alien to her, and she changed into the blouse and skirt Lael had chosen and went back into the lounge. There, she discussed a little bit of strategy with Sinclair and Beetee, but spent more time playing cards with Wiress and enjoying the heaping platters of food laid out for them for lunch and dinner. Cable had emerged when the first servings of food came out, but remained silent and mostly sat in the corner, keeping Amity company for the duration of the ride.

It was much later than Pixel was used to staying up, and her vision had gone blurry by the time the bright lights of the Capitol came into view. Beetee had told her she could go to sleep if she wanted, and he’d come wake her up when it was time to get off, but she’d wanted to see the Capitol. She told herself that being able to scout out the streets from the train would make her escape easier, but upon exiting the large tunnel that led them in, Pixel’s stomach sank.

No, she had to tell herself. She was getting out. She’d navigate those streets and leave from the direction the train came in, she just had to follow the tracks.

But, a smaller voice emerged. The Capitol was far larger than she could imagine. Somehow, from watching fourteen years of games, Pixel had figured it was just a city, several blocks in either direction, with high-rises like District Three. She hadn’t thought there would be houses or urban sprawl, suburbs and neighborhoods. It was vast, and just getting herself out of the Capitol itself would take days.

Pixel shook that thought from her head. She couldn’t afford to think like that, she decided as Lael looked out on a sleepy Capitol neighborhood near the outskirts. The escort squinted, and looked mildly conflicted.

“I used to live out here,” she said to nobody in particular. “It’s where I grew up.”

Pixel didn’t answer. The neighborhood was on the outskirts, but it was still the Capitol, and the houses here were nicer than anything she had seen in her entire District.

Beetee stood up and walked to the other car, where Cable had gone to take a nap, while the train pulled into the station. Suddenly, they were absolutely entrenched in reporters flooding towards the approaching cargo. Cameras flashed at the windows, and Pixel was startled a second before her instincts from earlier today kicked in and she began smiling. 

This was it. There was such a hubbub going on, and Pixel looked ahead into the station to see that another train was arriving at the same time. This was perfect. She’d have a few moments to get off into the station, feign being lost, duck under the train, wait for everything to die down, and make her walk to freedom. Easy.

She stood and walked towards the exit, offering to let Amity off due to her wheelchair, but the mentor insisted that the tribute exit first.

And suddenly, the barrage of questions and camera flashes and people yelling her name alerted Pixel that slipping away would be a much harder task than she’d imagined. She gulped down a taste of bile that had accumulated in her throat and waved for a minute before feeling a man’s hand on her shoulder- she couldn’t tell whether it was Beetee or Sinclair- to gently guide her forward.

A taller figure- a girl with thick, dark hair- stumbled in front of her, and the hand on Pixel’s shoulder let go to catch her. It was the District Ten girl, who had waved at the cameras.

Suddenly, Pixel knew this was the moment. The girl hadn’t fallen to the ground, but had tripped over something and was causing a bit of a ruckus. Quickly, Pixel slipped away. She was backing up towards the train, where there were fewer people. In fact, the reporters had all moved forward and were paying attention to the other girl. It was perfect. Pixel backed up a little bit, towards the train, ducked underneath the velvet ropes leading towards the Tribute Tower, back further and further towards her freedom and-

A white gloved hand grabbed her upper arm, and Pixel felt herself being shoved forward. 

“Nice try,” he muttered while he pushed the tribute.

“Wait…” Pixel stammered for a second. “No, I just… uh, I got lost.”

“Hm,” The Peacekeeper grunted with frustration.

“I just got lost, I promise!” Pixel pleaded with the Peacekeeper who now had his hand firmly wrapped around her arm. As he guided her back towards that carpet leading into the Tower, he disbelievingly muttered something about  _ tributes trying to escape all the time _ and  _ she was not the first one he’d caught red-handed, though he appreciated the act she was still putting on _ . “It’s not an act! I’m happy to be here, I swear!”

Pixel attempted to look him in the eyes, give him the child-too-uneducated-to-know-better look, but the helmet had obscured his face too much, and he shoved her through the crowd and back onto the carpet. Flashes of cameras hit her face and she was momentarily caught off-guard before she painted a smile back on and waved. 

Next time. She’d find a way out. If there was one thing Pixel was confident about, it was that there was no way she was actually going in that arena.

“Ok,” she muttered to herself. “Next time.”

It wasn’t until she turned around to face another set of cameras that she realized Sinclair was standing, stoic, waiting for her.

“Ah,” he muttered, and she felt her stomach sink. That was it. If she did end up going into that arena (she wasn’t going in there), she was screwed. Sinclair would tell the other mentors she was trying to escape and they wouldn’t spare her two more thoughts. But Pixel was surprised when she looked closer at his face and there was the hint of a smile on his lips, his eyebrows raised. “I knew there was more.”

Pixel crossed her arms and pursed her lips. “I got lost.”

“Sure you did,” he placed his hand back on her shoulder. “Smile for the cameras, Pixel. Then we’ll discuss. Hold off on any more attempts for tonight, ok?”

Pixel, doing what she was told, plastered a smile back on and waved to the cameras. The District Ten girl- Georgia, they were calling her- was further ahead but turned around and spotted Pixel. 

“Oh my goodness,” she gasped as she scampered back over to the Three tribute. “I’m so sorry, darlin’. Did I push you out of the way?”

“Oh,” Pixel responded, taken aback by the unexpected twang in her accent. The girl seemed nice, perhaps a little naive, and Pixel felt better again. She knew how to play these kinds of people, so she stepped back from the girl, giving her wide eyes and a do-gooder smile. “No, you’re fine. I hope you’re okay, too.”

“Well you’re just the sweetest!” she grinned. “Here, take a picture with me. You’re the little District Three girl, right?”

Pixel, somewhat taken aback by Georgia’s peppiness, agreed to a photo, and posed with a smile in front of the Capitol photographers. While the girl was distracted, Pixel slipped a finger into her dress pocket out of habit, but found nothing in there available to swipe.

“Yes,” she answered, feeling her voice get higher. It was as if her instincts were forcing her to play up her youth, knowing that this angle was something that could be exploited for favors from Capitolites and sympathy from bigger tributes. “I’m Pixel.”

“Well you are the cutest thing I’ve ever seen,” Georgia patted the top of Pixel’s head. She looked over to the side, where a young man in his mid-twenties, was motioning for her to come along with him. “My mentors are callin’ me back, but it was so nice to meet you!”

Pixel smiled at her and waved back, then stood on the red carpet, unable to decide what to do and vaguely uncomfortable before Wiress grabbed her hand.

“Come,” she said, motioning forward. A wave of relief washed over Pixel when she realized Wiress meant into the Tribute Tower, which loomed ahead of them and where Beetee was holding the door to let Cable inside. “Let’s go. You’re still sleepy.”

Wiress was right; Pixel hadn’t realized it with the rush of adrenaline that had hit her upon exiting the train, but the kid was exhausted and it was starting to catch up to her. She followed her mentor forward, giving polite waves to the reporters before hearing a voice alerting them that this was the last train for tonight, and to report at eight tomorrow morning for the arrivals from District Eleven.

While Lael directed the team through the lobby and towards the elevator, Pixel felt herself looking for more avenues of escape, more places to slip away. But she’d promised Sinclair she’d hold off for the night, and frankly her body wasn’t going to let her get very far before it collapsed from exhaustion. So she followed the team willingly into the elevator, up a few floors, and into the suite. Lael tried to show it off, explaining that she’d chosen the designs and how excited she was to get to finally live here, but Pixel slumped away after Wiress. At this point the woman’s braid had come almost completely undone, and her thick, curly hair was only barely held together by the tight elastic at the ends.

The mentor walked her down a hallway and knocked on the first door.

“Yours,” she said, opening the door to the room. “Get sleep. Plenty of time tomorrow to talk.”

Pixel nodded and walked into the room, shedding the bright and pristine clothes that had been given to her on the train, and managing to find a large t-shirt in the provided closet. It was newer and cleaner than the one she slept in at home, which was a hand-me-down from Coda, but it wasn’t as soft. Nevertheless, it was enough for her to be comfortable in, and as the lights of the city flared different colors a few floors down at ground level, Pixel buried herself in the plush comforter of the coziest bed she’d ever felt. 

It was empty, she realized, while she started to drift off to sleep. This was the first night in her memory she hadn’t had to share a bed with Vista. In any other circumstance she would’ve been happy for the peace and quiet, but the night air felt hollow without her sister’s soft snores lulling her to slumber.

In the end it didn’t matter much, though, as fatigue took her. Pixel fell asleep, the worries of the day pushed off until tomorrow.


	5. Chapter 5

The first morning in the Capitol was uneventful, as Pixel could only assume that the last few trains of tributes were pulling in. Beetee explained to her that this day was typically the one that stylists spent designing costumes and outfits for their tributes, and Gamemakers spent making necessary adjustments to the pre-Games festivities. 

After lunch, however, it was decided that it was time for the duo’s makeovers. And Pixel was subjected to another first for her: grooming and beauty routines. At home, India was the one who spent the most time on her own appearance, attempting to get her sisters to use the hair creme she’d invented to tame the wild curls she shared with Vista and Canta. But Vista, like Pixel, was uninterested.

Pixel had never been subjected to such scrutiny in her life as the beauty team plucked and scrubbed and scraped her. They tsk’ed at the outcropping of pubescent acne that had spread across her forehead, and poked and prodded each bump until it was as smooth as it had been during her early childhood, then lamented they couldn’t do anything about the freckles covering her face. They waxed her legs, shaved her arms, cut her hair, and did something to her feet that she didn’t look at but she wasn’t sure she hated.

She and Cable were sent down with Lael at one point to take professional photographs, where the escort directed them at the personas she had decided they should take on. After trying and moderately succeeding in getting Cable to look like an intimidating hacker-type, intelligent like Beetee, she pulled Pixel to the front. 

“Ok, Pixel, just do as you were doing last night,” she directed. “Smile! Be a little goofy and silly. You’re the youngest, and I know you’re fourteen and probably too cool but they’re going to be seeing you as a little kid and I want to play that up. Can you do that?”

“For sure,” Pixel nodded and smiled. 

Of course the photographs felt inauthentic, but that didn’t bother Pixel. Inauthenticity was the reason she’d become so adept at stealing things from other people. She would have been lying to herself if she said she cared a lick about honesty.

And then, after all this, she was sent to her stylist.

Being so young, they allowed Pixel a robe for her appointment with Timon, who entered the room wearing all-black, down to his cape and the swipe of lipstick he wore. The man spoke in the same affected accent as Lael, though it was in a much deeper tone, and explained that he’d heard from Sinclair that she worked with tablets and screens and that was the impression that stuck with him for tonight’s tribute parade.

And before Pixel knew it, with all of the rushing and the primping and prodding, she was being pushed out onto a chariot with Cable next to her. 

The two were finding themselves needing to be extremely careful with each movement, as their outfits consisted of shards of broken metal and glass. Pixel’s dress, a basic cap sleeve skater dress that fell to just above her knees, was made entirely of chrome, twisted around her body in a smooth curve. Over the top was a kimono of sorts, made entirely of shards of glass and metal weaved into the loose fabric, so that every time she moved it jingled. Part of her felt that if she attempted anything more than a wave, a piece would fall off and slice her down her arm. 

On her feet were simple derby shoes, made of clear plastic instead of leather. They were uncomfortable, but manageable as the chariot made its way down through the city center, where they eventually came to a stop to hear President Snow’s address to them. 

It was nothing new. In fact, Pixel decided it may as well have been a word-for-word copy of the speech she’d heard yesterday in the Reaping video, not that she’d paid much attention to it, and didn’t pay much mind to this one at all either. Instead, she took in her fellow tributes, gathered around the square with her. 

The twins from One were gossiping to each other, pointing at the other tributes and laughing at what Pixel could only assume was something cruel. The boy from Two stared intently on President Snow, taking in every word. The girl from Ten, Georgia, looked out towards the audience, searching for, Pixel figured, her mentors and stylist.

And then the chariot was pulling back, and Pixel and Cable were being led away towards the stables, and she felt the immense relief of the broken glass being pulled off of her body.

“Excellent!” Sinclair exclaimed, walking towards the duo with the mentors, stylists, and Lael in tow. The other three mentors were discussing something amongst themselves, and Lael and the stylists had picked out some of their friends to scamper off to. “Perfect! You two are flawless.”   


Pixel smiled at her mentor and adjusted the metal dress that had been incredibly arduous to put on. “Thanks. Are we just supposed to go back to our floor after this?”

Sinclair nodded. “Tomorrow you begin your public training sessions. They don’t show this on the Hunger Games programming back at home, but it’s pretty cut-and-dry. All twenty-four of you will be put in the training center for three days to work on your survival skills. We can discuss more later but just know I’m going to want you to work on things you don’t already know how to do. Learn how to build a fire or use a knife. No sneaky stuff, Pixel. Cable?”

Pixel’s district partner raised his eyebrows. “Yeah?”

“I actually want to discuss more with you,” Sinclair folded his burly arms the same way he had on the train. “I had a little more time to strategize with Pixel earlier and it’s not fair to leave you behind. What are you good at? Take a walk with me.”

“Well-” Cable started before Sinclair motioned him to walk back with him. “Thermodynamics is kind of my thing-”

Pixel was left alone as the two stepped away to discuss. In a way she felt bad for Cable. He clearly didn’t have the same penchant for bullshitting that she did, and she was wondering if it was possible at all for the guy to get sponsors without charming the Capitolites. A strong score after his private training session would have to be his saving grace, she figured. If he could show off something impressive to the Gamemakers, the Capitol might see him as some reincarnation of the way Beetee played almost thirty years ago.

That was probably what they hoped of every District Three tribute, she mused to herself as she took a step away, trying to avoid the horses attached to the next chariot over. One of them- brown and strong and much larger than she’d ever expected a horse to be- clomped its hoof at her. 

“Oh!” she jumped back a little bit. It was her first time ever seeing one of the large animals and she decided in the moment that she wasn’t a fan.

“You ok?” Pixel heard a voice not five feet away from her. She turned and was stricken immediately with more fear than a horse could ever instill in her. 

Urban of District Two was about the same height as Cable, but that was where the resemblance stopped. While he wasn’t as brawny and built as past tributes from Two, or his fellow Careers from One and Four, he sported lean and sculpted muscles down his entire body. He reminded Pixel of Four’s most recent victor, Seychelle, who claimed to have gotten her physique from swimming every day back home. The girl had been sixteen when she won three years ago, but was easily the most able of that year’s Careers.

“Uh,” Pixel stuttered for a second, feeling herself going back to that innocent kid that had appeared on the red carpet only yesterday. “Yes.”

“It’s ok,” Urban carefully patted the rear haunch of a mottled gray horse close to him. “They won’t hurt you unless you’re really stupid.”

The District Two tributes were not given a lot of clothing to go through this parade. Urban and Petra were dressed in crisp white togas, with olive branches perched on top of their heads. Urban’s was tied incredibly loose around his top half, lithe muscles clearly visible and leaving little to the imagination.

“Thanks,” Pixel answered with a small smile.

“You’re Pixel, right? The youngest one this year, from Three?” he asked, prying further. His voice was soft, and Pixel was unsure how to interact with him. He was so unlike any of the Careers she’d seen on her television, but perhaps that was his strategy. Get the others to let their guards down, then murder them viciously a week later. But what kind of guard would Pixel even have to let down, as a fairly small fourteen-year-old? “I’m Urban, from Two.”

Pixel simply nodded. “Pixel. It’s nice to meet you.”

“You, too,” he shot her a smile just as dazzling as Sinclair’s, and Pixel immediately knew she was in trouble. She’d figured it would be easy to be the Capitol’s darling this year, but this guy had the makings of a fan favorite. He couldn’t have been any younger than seventeen, and she could already see the guy’s face plastered across Capitol televisions and on posters in Capitol teenagers’ bedrooms. He was a heartthrob already, Pixel realized as her face got hot. 

“Don’t get into too much trouble, Pixel,” he smiled at her as he gave the horse another pat and turned around to his mentors. She noted Teo standing in the front of the group, placing both his hands on his son’s shoulders, and he spoke to him with what looked like a calm sincerity.

Pixel turned back around to where Timon was waiting, and the man led her into a back room to get her changed into more comfortable clothes and sent her on her way. 

“Straight back to the third floor,” he directed her as he opened the door and pointed her towards the elevator. Pixel nodded with her eyes bright, hiding the glee deep down that she’d have time with nobody babysitting her. And with nobody watching…

“Sure thing,” she said with a smile, turning on her heels and walking out into the lobby.

Pixel, instead of taking the elevator up to the third floor, decided to walk up a set of grand stairs to the mezzanine of the Tribute Tower. There were far fewer people milling about on the next floor, and Pixel wouldn’t have a problem climbing down one story if she could find a stray window somewhere.

She peeped into a few rooms, which were mostly offices or design studio spaces, but all were either occupied or devoid of windows. So Pixel continued down a hallway to her right, gently looking into each room until she noticed her target.

It seemed a small library, or a reading room of sorts, no larger than a big office. One light was turned on in the corner, but it was still fairly dark, and there were several couches and cozy chairs placed around the room. On the other end, to Pixel’s delight, was a small window. Too small for any other tribute to slip through, but perfect for someone who was skinny, 4’10”, and used to squeezing through small spaces to get herself out of trouble. 

Gleefully, Pixel knew it. This was her opportunity. She’d get through the window, climb down the exterior of the building, hop onto the street, and make her escape. The time had never been sweeter or more perfect, and Pixel stuck her head back out the door to look both ways down the hallway. With nobody following her, she walked into the room and closed the door, then scurried towards the window.

The window was easy enough to open, she noted as she smiled to herself, and she got the pane all the way up to the top effortlessly. Getting on her tiptoes, Pixel stuck her head out and took a deep breath of the night air.

“Hello?”

Pixel froze. The voice had come from behind her. Someone was watching her escape attempt.


	6. Chapter 6

“ _ Shit _ ,” Pixel muttered under her breath as she stepped back from the window and turned.

The girl who had caught her was seated in a cozy-looking chair next to the only light in the room, just beside the door, with an open book in her hand. It was no wonder Pixel hadn’t seen her; she’d practically slammed the door onto her face. The girl reached up to the power panel next to her and flicked on the rest of the lights in the room. 

“If you want fresh air, they let tributes out onto the roof,” she noted, and with her soft voice Pixel suddenly recognized her.

Cecelia Bolivar of District Eight had won last year’s Games, and was now the darling of the Capitol. She was Panem’s sweetheart, having spent her time in the arena softly getting through by killing tributes in their sleep. It seemed the most humane way anybody had made it through the Games in recent history. She’d won from a try at poisoning gone wrong that had ended up turning in her favor during the final battle. The girl from One had survived the initial attempt Cecelia had made to plant homemade poisons on her, though she’d still consumed them all unwittingly through the next couple of weeks. By the time there were only two tributes left, she was so weakened by the poisons that there wasn’t any particular struggle for the girl from Eight.

“Are you lost?” Cecelia asked, Pixel having stopped to stare at her for an uncomfortable amount of time. “I’m sorry, I didn’t really watch most of the reapings this year, I’m assuming you’re a tribute?”

“Um, yes,” Pixel answered, eyes wide. She reached up to scratch her head, feeling the familiar taste of a lie bubble up into her throat. “Sorry, I was doing a little exploring after the parade. Figured it might be my only chance.”

“Oh!” Cecelia placed a bookmark in the novel she was reading and set the book in her lap. “Well you haven’t found anywhere exciting, I’m afraid. Not a lot of people use this room, it’s just kind of a space for extra book storage. The Gamemakers have their own library upstairs, so whatever isn’t useful to them goes in here. What district are you from, if I might ask?”

Pixel remembered Cecelia as being incredibly petite during her Games, and had thought that the girl would starve before reaching the end. She nearly had, having cried in relief when a late-game sponsor gift arrived bearing beef jerky and two loaves of bread. Perhaps she’d just been malnourished at the time, or perhaps adulthood was now starting to take hold, but she’d gained a few curves in the year since exiting the arena. That much was clear as she stood up from the chair. Her deep brown bangs swept across the dark copper skin of her forehead, and she reached up to pull out the ponytail that held the rest of her long, thick hair. Pixel’s eye was drawn to the two missing fingers on her left hand, where the girl from One had landed a strike before falling.

“Three,” Pixel pulled a lock of hair behind her ear. “My name is Pixel. I’m, uh… the youngest this year.”

There was a hint of sadness that flashed across Cecelia’s face when Pixel mentioned that. One of her first kills last year had been the twelve-year-old boy from Seven. He’d come to her in a moment of desperation with a wound on his leg and she, telling him about her younger siblings that she cared for back home, took him in and patched it up. They remained together for a couple of days. One night, while she sat on watch, she’d started to cry as the country watched, confused.

“ _ I’m sorry _ ,” she’d said to the sleeping boy as she placed her sleeping mat over his mouth and nose. His suffocation was a moment played back as one of the biggest tearjerkers in Games history, as if she’d done it for the entertainment of the Capitol. 

“That’s hard,” she said to Pixel now. “Must be a grown-up group this year. You look older than twelve.”

Pixel nodded. “I’m fourteen.”

The older teenager smiled. “I’m Cecelia, by the way. I don’t know if… sorry, you probably knew that.”

“I did, but that’s ok,” Pixel answered, unsure of what to do with her limbs. She crossed her arms over each other. “Um, thanks for the tip about the roof. I’ll take a look later.”

“Of course!” Cecelia smiled at her. “Do you need directions to the elevators? Your mentors are, like, Wiress and Sinclair and them right? I bet they’re starting to wonder where you are.”

“Sure,” Pixel lied, feeling like asking for directions would only emphasize just how  _ lost  _ and  _ pathetic _ she was. Nothing to see here, just a little kid who couldn’t even find an elevator. “And yeah, them and Beetee and Amity.”

Cecelia took a few steps, then pointed down the hallway from which Pixel had come, and explained the directions to get her back to the suite. Her safe prison. Pixel thanked her and took a fews steps out before Cecelia stopped her. 

“If you need anything,” she said softly. “I’m with District Eight. Um, I think they’ll be sending me down to check on my tributes during lunchtimes while you guys have your public training days. Just let me know if you need someone to talk to or anything. Being the youngest is hard.”

Pixel simply nodded before taking her leave of the room, feeling defeated once more. Three failed escape attempts in two days was really putting a dent in her otherwise flawless record. Cecelia had been nice and all (and it was good to know that her reputation from the arena wasn’t just a front to gain public sympathy), but she had seemed utterly clueless as to why Pixel was actually there. Pixel wasn’t angry about that.

The ride up to the third floor was brief, and upon exiting the elevator doors she was immediately assaulted by a flurry of pink and yellow and glitter. It was Lael, whose entire face was flushed. 

“Where were you?” Lael asked, her eyebrows furrowed in worry. “I called down to the ground floor after we got up here and gave you a few minutes. Thought you might be making friends or… or allies or… whatever but they said you’d left!”

Pixel bit her lip and shrank back into herself for half a second. 

“I got lost,” she said, in as small a voice as she figured was passable. “I think I took a wrong turn. But I ran into Cecelia, from last year, and she helped.”

Lael let out a rush of air from her lungs, then let her hand move up her chest while she took a deep breath in. She breathed out. 

“I’m sorry,” Lael said, then lifted a hand to Pixel’s shoulder. “Let’s get you back into the suite. I’m a little high-strung this year, so again, I’m sorry. I just… I want you guys to do well  _ so badly _ and I’m sticking my neck out for sponsors and this year they’re just…”

Lael paused, then stopped speaking altogether. Pixel felt as if the escort had been about to tell her something that wasn’t healthy to hear. Something like “ _ District Three isn’t pulling any sponsors, and if you were hoping to live three days in the arena I’m sorry but there’s no help coming _ ”. But Pixel could only infer so much from a glance, and her subconscious was starting to expect the worst no matter the context.

“Pixel!” Wiress sat up straight in the couch where she’d been laying only a few moments ago while her tribute entered the room. “Your hair is so pretty. Has anyone told you that?”

Pixel was stunned for a second by the comment, then pulled a lock of her red hair behind her ear. “Um, no. But thanks, Wiress.”

“Other kids probably liked your hair,” she pointed out. “Kids don’t like giving compliments to other kids, especially when they feel like you’re better than them at something. What were you better at?”

“Oh, uh,” Pixel stuttered. The sound of footsteps emerged, and she whipped her head around to see Sinclair coming down the hallway from the bedrooms with another man about his age. 

“Wiress! You and your questions. You’re not making our Pixel uncomfortable, are you?” he asked the other victor on the couch. Wiress shut her mouth and looked away from Pixel, her brows suddenly tightly knit and her mouth puckered. Sinclair sighed. “No, I’m sorry, don’t be like that. I was kidding!”

“Really, you’re fine,” Pixel added. “To answer your question, I was smarter than them, I think. I kind of managed to take a lot of their things without them realizing it.”

Wiress glanced back at Pixel and Sinclair, and let her features relax into a polite smile. She stood from the couch. “Ok. I’m going to my bedroom.”

As Wiress walked up, past Pixel and Lael, she reached the hallway towards the bedrooms, where Sinclair was standing with the other man. The man was large, both in height and in bulk. With a bare head and noticeable biceps, the man looked more suited for a Capitol action movie than the District Three suite. 

“Goodnight, Sinclair,” Wiress nodded to him, then turned to the other man. “Goodnight, Brutus.”

The men repeated the sentiment back to her, then moved further into the suite, where they could access the kitchen. Sinclair opened the refrigerator, then closed it again, settling for an apple that was sitting in a fruit bowl on the kitchen island. He took a bite, then turned to his tribute. 

“Pixel, this is Brutus Donovan,” he clapped his empty hand on Brutus’s shoulder. “District Two mentor. He’s a… dear friend of mine.”

Lael suddenly squeaked as a buzzer on her person went off, then excused herself and scurried away, pulling her phone out and typing frantically.

“Hi,” Pixel stood in the same spot, wanting to follow Wiress down the hall to her own bedroom but feeling pulled to stay here for the sake of politeness. “It’s nice to meet you. I met your tribute earlier today.”

“Urban, I’m assuming,” Brutus answered with a nod. “Considering Petra doesn’t really talk much. He’s a nice kid. I think he’ll go far.”

Pixel swallowed down the lump of fear that had risen into her throat. If she went into that arena, her chances against someone like Urban were slim to none. But no, she couldn’t think that way. 

“Yeah, he was nice,” she agreed.

“Pixel, my dear, you’re looking tired,” Sinclair butted in, to her relief. “Why don’t you head on down to your bedroom? You’ll need your strength for training tomorrow.”

Pixel just nodded and walked away from the two men. She was happy to be saved from the awkward conversation, and turned her head to look back for half a second to notice Sinclair leaning in to say something quiet to Brutus. Were they scheming somehow? Getting some sort of alliance set up between Two and Three? There was no way a District Two mentor would accept a scrawny fourteen-year-old tagging along with his tribute, so Pixel could only assume that Cable had started impressing the mentors in some way she hadn’t expected.

It was the only logical reason for the duo, she told herself as she opened the door to her bedroom, and shut it tight behind her.


	7. Chapter 7

The public training center was the largest indoor location Pixel had ever seen. 

Ok, that wasn’t  _ entirely _ true, considering the amount of high-rises she’d been to in District Three. Those skyscrapers held dozens of factory floors each with ceilings fourteen feet high, each floor stacked on top of the next where workers would sit and assemble memory cards or cell phones or computer motherboards. Though the spaces were large, they were crowded and bustling. The same could not be said for the tribute training center in the Capitol, which sat vast and sparse and silent. 

Twenty-four tributes stood off to the side in athletic gear that displayed large numbers on their backs and arms to show off what district they were from. A trainer stood in front of them, discussing the various stations they could visit during their three days here. On a ledge overlooking the large room stood a few Gamemakers, as well as some brightly-dressed sponsors who had arrived for a sneak peek of what was to come.

Pixel pulled her sleeve down further on her arm, the large “3” that had been embroidered into it starting to itch a little. She glanced over to her right, where Cable stood stoically, watching the trainer with intent (part of her wondered just what Sinclair had seen in him to presumably set him up with an alliance with Two- the guy didn’t seem any stronger or smarter than anyone else here; certainly he didn’t seem smarter than  _ her) _ . Pixel squinted a little at him and chewed on her lip, then let her eyes wander a bit.

In front of the two of them were the twins from One, who were already whispering and making jokes with the pairs from Two and Four. Urban smiled back jovially to one comment from Praxis while Petra remained stone-faced, eyes trained on the woman in front of them. The pair from Four each seemed to let their eyes dart over the rest of the tributes, bloodthirsty and seeking weakness. The boy was short- nearly as short as the tiny Miriam- but had the look of a jackal ready to pounce. And the girl, with wild brown curls pulled back into a tight ponytail, would lay her eyes on Pixel herself every few seconds, suspicious and mildly hostile.

The head trainer had introduced herself as Pollia, and was pointing out stations and explaining the importance of survival skills over weaponry. Pixel understood this. In fact, learning survival would probably be good for her. She’d settled on remaining in the Capitol for a couple more days before making her real escape. Probably the night before private training, she’d told herself. Then she’d have all the skills she needed to hunt and survive on the long road back to District Three.

When Pollia told them to get going, she split from Cable and headed towards the survival station, where there stood a young man in his early twenties, with deep bronze skin and tousled brown hair. He was not a Capitolite; this much was obvious from the first sight of him. In fact, anyone who had watched recent Games would recognize the face of Blight Dupont, victor of the 56th year. He’d hailed from District Seven, and had won by simply surviving most of his Games, eventually bringing down a few members of the strong Career pack with deadly axe skill. 

“Hi,” Pixel waved at him, then sat down at his station. “Um, I didn’t realize that victors were also trainers.”

Blight laughed a little, light and humorous. “It’s something they’ve been implementing lately. It’s a volunteer gig, but some victors like to give tributes more of a fighting chance. Brutus over there-”

He pointed to another corner of the training center, where, indeed, Pixel could see the same bald man from the night before sparring with the twins from One. They seemed almost equally matched, each wielding a scary-looking knife.

“-he likes to teach weaponry. He’s terrifying, but he won’t bite kids like you,” Blight told her. He spread his hands around the display. There sat several different branches and pieces of tinder, a pack of matches and some flint. A knife, some leaves. “You want to learn how to build a fire? Can’t promise you’ll need it for warmth, since sometimes arenas are indoors, but it’s good for cooking food or boiling contagions out of water.”

“Contagions?” Pixel furrowed her brows together. District Three had never wanted for clean water, considering it sat on such a huge freshwater lake. She’d never considered that water could be unclean or tainted.

“Yup,” Blight nodded, pulling together some of the tiniest scraps of tinder. “Some places you’re not gonna have easy access to clean water. If you don’t boil it, it’ll do a number on your insides. You’ll be spending the Games in absolute misery, and there’s a good chance someone with a weapon will catch you with your pants down, literally. Probably best not to go out like that.”

Pixel laughed a little and sat down, allowing Blight to show her basic survival techniques. He began with firemaking, and built up a small teepee shape of bark and twigs to begin.

It was about an hour in, and Pixel had just about gotten the basics down, when she felt a presence approach her from behind. Assuming it was probably Cable, she turned her head, but was surprised to see Urban already taking a seat beside her.

“This spot open?” he asked mindlessly, already knowing the answer as he reached for a lighter and flicked it alive a couple of times. The trainer welcomed him with a bit of surprise, mentioning that  _ his kind _ usually stick together (Pixel got the impression that Blight was not much of a fan of the Career pack).

Urban had brown hair that was cut just long enough for Pixel to see how thick and curly it was, and he listened intently when Blight moved on to the basics on finding shelter. Pixel’s eyes traced over the cardboard panels, the leaves and scrap metal that had been set aside for this lesson with a bit of unease, though she wasn’t sure whether she was nervous about this lesson in particular or about sitting next to a literal killing machine. 

“You ok?” Urban turned to Pixel, who realized she’d gone silent. 

She nodded and decided to play up her  _ scared, young girl _ act. “Yeah. This is… a lot.”

Urban smirked. “Sure, sure. I’ll bet you don’t know any of this stuff. I'd say you probably don't know anything at all, but... I saw you on the red carpet coming in.”

Pixel looked at him and bit her lip, letting her eyes get wide and innocent. But she remained silent.

“Yeah, our mentors like us to stay and watch our competitors come in. See if there’s anyone to start strategizing against,” he continued, his voice light and humorous. Pixel wasn’t sure where he was going with it, but she could tell by the directness that this was the reason he’d come to sit by her. “That was quite an escape attempt you made.”

Pixel’s heart stopped a beat, then she turned her eyes up at him as if she were about to cry. “I got lost! The Peacekeeper was mean to me.”

Urban laughed a bit, then picked up a metal rod and some twine. “Sure, sure. I’ll bet the Capitol will believe that. I’ve got sneaky little brothers, Pixel, I know when a kid is up to some shit. Kudos, though. I don’t have anything against playing like that.”

Finally, Pixel let her face fall and she picked up the corner of a tarp that Blight had set out for the two of them. There was something surprising about Urban. She knew in her head to never trust a Career, that as soon as they were in the arena this guy would snap her neck before she got the chance to plead for her life. But something in her responded to the guy. Perhaps she just knew that he’d be able to see through her lies, and perhaps there was something she just  _ liked _ about him.

“I almost got away,” she said matter-of-factly. “He  _ was _ mean, too. Like, what was I going to do? I’m fourteen, it’s not like I could fight him.”

Urban laughed again and began weaving the twine through the tarp Pixel handed him. “Yeah, sure. Might want to be a little more sneaky about it next time. Some of these other kids might… not quite like this act you’re putting up.”

He let his head tilt over, where the small, blonde Miriam was standing with the frizzy-haired girl from Four. They were looking over at the odd pair at the survival station with a suspicious look, occasionally saying the odd remark before moving up in line for archery.

“Miriam and Helene,” Urban noted. “Can you do me a favor and try not to piss those two off?”

Pixel dropped the items she’d picked up and turned to face him. “Why are you talking to me like this? Shouldn’t you be hanging out with them? You barely know me.”

Urban shrugged and ran his right hand through his mop of curly hair. “My mentors have a good relationship with Three. They don’t want me to fuck that up, so my dad and Brutus asked me to be nice to you guys.”

Blight pulled a knot tight on the growing shelter, clearly listening but not chiming in. Since Urban had sat down, he’d become someone terse. Still helpful, but not quite as forthcoming as he'd been when he was alone with the girl from Three.

“Ok,” Pixel raised an eyebrow, still confused. “But ‘being nice’ doesn’t equate to ‘making friends’ or ‘going against your own alliance’.”

“I’m not going against the rest of those guys,” Urban answered, not even bothering to deny the early existence of the pack of Career tributes. They’d all trained for this their entire lives. They’d known who would be on their side since Reaping Day. “And like I said before, I have little brothers. I’ve got a soft spot for kids.”

He picked up the rest of the tarp and stood up to stretch it across the collection of sticks and rods that had been pulled together. Pixel remained still. What he seemed to be offering here was a friendly face, though that was incredibly far away from an alliance, and she didn’t doubt that in the arena, he would still kill her if it came down to it. What Pixel hadn’t missed through this whole survival exercise were the built muscles that bulged when he was pulling the strings taught, the determination in his eyes to get the structure finished. This was a guy who had been trained to be a killing machine, and to finish the job, no matter the hardship. But for the moment, she felt comfortable around him. Which was nice, she guessed, though probably kind of stupid.

“Well,” Pixel said as the shelter was finished. “Uh, thanks.”

“No problem,” Urban grinned, flashing a set of healthy white teeth. “Just… please take my advice. Try not to cross my crew if you don’t have to. I don’t want to have to see all that.”

Pixel simply nodded in response. So he was only trying to assuage his own guilt, she figured. The guy didn’t want to be responsible for killing the youngest tribute this year. He didn’t want to be the bad guy. If (when) he emerged victorious, Urban Fonseca wanted to be a hero, not a villain. 

Somehow, that made Pixel feel better about trusting him. 


	8. Chapter 8

The rest of the day was uneventful. Pixel waved to Cecelia at lunch, but left her to commune with her own tributes while Pixel sat for a quiet meal with Cable. The two tributes from Three exchanged pleasantries, then went together to train in trapping and fishing for the afternoon with a Capitolite who had bright green hair and a matching beard. He taught them how to create a snare for rabbits and squirrels, then a lure for fish, though Pixel was thinking more about how this would help her on the trek back to District Three than of any usage in the arena. The last hour or so of their train ride had been mountainous, which meant wilderness. If Pixel could hunt squirrels, build shelter, and decontaminate water, that would be all she needed. 

All that was left was to get out of the Tribute Tower and find her way back to the train station undetected. She could look at the timetables (remembering how to read them from her work back in Three), figure out which tracks led home, and get going.

But she would train for two more days first. Pixel had already scouted a couple of opportunities- the window from the reading room where she’d met Cecelia the day before, perhaps there was a ladder off the roof, and there seemed to be a fire escape from the Three suite (though the window leading out to it was locked tight).

And, she figured, all of those required climbing. So on the second day of public training, Pixel beelined to the available climbing wall. 

There were two tributes already there, Pixel realized as she approached, and one looked a little more than familiar.

“Pixel!” Georgia’s thick twang sounded across the ten feet between them. The girl had already been strapped into the climbing wall (God forbid the group of them get injured before their inevitable grisly demises in the arena), and was standing next to another girl who was being tended to by the trainer for this station. Pixel vaguely recognized her as the stoic tribute from Eleven. She stood tall and thin, with deep brown skin and braids that reached her waist even though they were pulled back in a ponytail. “You wanna join me and Isadora?”

Pixel bit her lip nervously. She didn’t particularly want to get to know all of these other tributes. Lael had prattled on and on the night before about alliances and making friends, and had been excited to hear that Pixel had become friendly with a Career tribute (Sinclair had simply raised his eyebrows in amusement). But alliances weren’t something Pixel had to think about, really. In fact, they might just serve to get those tributes into trouble. If she went missing, the Capitol might see them as accomplices and hurt them in the arena.

No, it was best to stay away. Unfortunately, it was too little, too late for this particular encounter, as the trainer had already moved onto Pixel and was pulling the harness onto her without any assent. 

“Sure,” Pixel nodded, trying to keep up her act.  _ All of this was an act, wasn’t it? _ Part of Pixel envied the other tributes; they could be themselves, train without worries, make alliances, not have to put on a front for the Capitol.  _ But they’d nearly all be dead in two weeks _ , she had to remind herself. Pixel couldn’t let on that she was smarter than them, smarter than the Capitol, that she was sneaky and a thief. She had to keep all suspicion as far away from her as possible.

The trainer- a woman in her thirties who, like Blight, seemed to be another victor volunteering to help- finished strapping Pixel in and explained the basics. Not that the three of them needed it; the climbing wall was about as intuitive as it got.

Isadora went first without speaking, making Georgia rush to catch up with her. Pixel quickly clamored up as well, and while Georgia tried to make small talk as they went up, the other two girls didn’t speak much in response.

“Oh you girls are fast,” Georgia breathed. Her hair had been pulled into a braid that fell down her back, and pieces were coming out around her face as sweat started to fall. “I’m not used to climbin’, I’m sorry.”

While Isadora reached the top, Pixel was only about two-thirds of the way up, and looked down to see Georgia struggling. 

“Here,” Pixel held her hand down, knowing she wouldn’t be that much help, being the smallest and weakest of the bunch, but figuring it would be nice to offer.

Georgia smiled and thanked her, then took her hand while the two of them made their way to the top. 

“Cool,” Isadora spoke for the first time, nearly at a murmur. “Georgia, are you good?”

The other girl smiled and nodded, her chest heaving while she caught her breath. Pixel simply clung awkwardly to the handhold; Isadora had barely made eye contact with her, and it was becoming clear that the girl didn’t particularly want her here. Perhaps she was wanting to discuss things privately with Georgia, or maybe she just didn’t want to be responsible for this year’s little kid. 

Isadora turned her head up towards Pixel, and the look in her eyes answered the question for her. Pixel immediately recognized it: it was the look her older siblings gave her when they wanted time with only the “big kids”. She was nothing more than a child to babysit in this girl’s eyes. Which was fine with Pixel.

If Pixel had actually planned on going into the arena, she figured she would have clung onto these two older girls. Stayed around in case they were forming an alliance, or discussing strategy. But it didn’t feel right to intrude if she was going to be a couple of days into her journey by the time the platforms ascended into the arena. Again, the fewer people that knew about her plan, the better.

So Pixel spent precious few minutes at the top of the wall, then gave Georgia a goodbye. She nodded respectfully to Isadora, and descended the wall before either one had a chance to say anything else to her.

It was as the trainer unstrapped her from the harness that Pixel was hit with a pang in her gut. She truly would be forced to go the rest of this alone. It wouldn’t be smart to train with Georgia or Urban or even Cable. Any associations with other tributes would only mean trouble for them in the arena. As if there wouldn’t be enough trouble already.

Pixel’s eyes darted towards the combat stations, where she almost expected some of the Career girls to be eyeing her like they had done while she’d trained with Urban. But no, nobody paid attention to the small girl at the foot of the rock climbing wall. The twins from One were doing hand-to-hand sparring with the duo from Two, drawing eyes towards them as Miriam and Praxis shouted commands and praises to each other. The pair from Four watched and would occasionally shout jeers in one direction or the other. Urban and Petra were impressive, slinging shots at their opponents while there were openings, but there wasn’t the same choreography as existed with the siblings. Miriam, noticing eyes on her, would even throw in a backflip on occasion. The tributes from Two didn’t seem to be ones for showiness, and after one of these backflips, Petra rolled her eyes and landed a foot in Miriam’s stomach.

“Hey!” Miriam squeaked, her voice about as high-pitched as one would expect from such a small body. She swung her leg around to attempt to push Petra off-balance, but the bigger girl simply grabbed her foot and pulled her to the ground. Miriam sat for a second while Praxis watched with furrowed brows. Then her pout turned into a devious smile and she somersaulted through Petra’s long legs, pounced, and landed on Urban’s unsuspecting back.

“Whoa there,” Urban laughed.

Pixel couldn’t look away. It was as if they were kids on a playground, not worried about any real-life consequences. If that had happened in the arena, at least two people would be dead by now. But the Careers were helping each other up from the mats, patting themselves on the backs, and getting back to sparring. And they didn’t care a bit whether or not they were drawing attention to themselves.

As Pixel walked along the perimeter of the training center, she dared a glance back at Georgia and Isadora, who were now descending the climbing wall and engrossed in conversation. Each of them would occasionally turn back to watch the Careers in action, and would whisper something in the other’s ear. 

It was good they had each other, Pixel decided as she found a lone spot at the plants station. An alliance would help them get far in the Games. 

The instructor, happy that someone here was ready to learn about plants and poisons and what was edible and not, handed her a leaflet with several diagrams, and Pixel let herself be engrossed by it. As long as she was by herself, she would be fine.

The day continued, and Pixel slipped from station to station under the radar from any other tributes. She never caught the group of sponsors and Gamemakers looking in her direction, she never made a fuss. She even got away with nicking a pair of earbuds and a small chain necklace from the pockets of a couple of trainers. It was like old times back at home, though she didn’t have anyone to share her goodies with.

Back in Three, the only siblings who really knew the extent of her thievery were Vista, Linus, and Page. The four middle Delaroux kids, aged nine to fourteen, were the silent ones of the group. They did what they were told, helped their parents care for the younger kids, stayed out of the way of the older ones. When Pixel learned that she could get away with taking things from other people- shopkeepers in the streets, wealthy members of merchant families- it wasn’t long until she was teaching Vista her ways. And while Vista wasn’t as good at pickpocketing as she was, she had a bright mind and the wherewithal to cleverly make things up when the two of them got into trouble. Pixel was the mastermind, Vista was the improviser, and Linus and Page were the accomplices. 

The four would share in their spoils in secret, oftentimes splitting a small loaf of bread after their meager dinners. They’d get together in the back alley behind their small house, chewing on the crust and doling out coins and bills that they’d managed to snag that week. Pixel would often spend her share on junk food, which was a luxury the family never spent money on because it wouldn’t fill hungry stomachs.

What she wouldn’t give now for a stale crust and a bag of chips, she thought to herself as she now ate her dinner in silence at the end of the second day of training. They had served a rich shepherd’s pie, several inches tall and enveloped in a flaky, buttery pastry. Pixel mixed her peas and chicken around, taking a few small bites here and there, but largely ignoring the dinner while her escort and mentors chatted amongst each other. If they noticed that she wasn’t eating, they, thankfully, didn’t say anything.

At the thought of home and her siblings, Pixel was beginning to feel hollow. She didn’t know if it was because she missed them, or because she had never been alone like this in her lifetime, but the emptiness was starting to gnaw on her insides. 

She slept easily that night, but getting out of bed was a chore, and throughout the third day of training she simply drifted. One trainer taught her how to use a knife, another taught her to skin and prepare small animals to be eaten. She ran through an obstacle course a couple of times, trying to feel that excitement she’d had only a couple of days before. Tonight was supposed to be her escape, she reminded herself. She had to be prepared for it. 

But by the time training was over, Pixel still felt nothing but loneliness. It didn’t matter, she figured. She’d be alone for several days, anyway, once she got out on the road. 

Pixel had decided that she’d escape through the window that Cecelia had caught her at earlier. It was closest to the ground and hardest to find. And throughout her several days in the Capitol, Pixel had been hoarding away small bits of food- a dinner roll or a bunch of grapes or an apple she’d pulled from the kitchen in the middle of the night. She’d fashioned a small sack out of one of her bedsheets (who needed both a fitted sheet  _ and _ a top sheet, anyway?), and stowed it under her bed for when she was ready to go.

And tonight had to be the night, she told herself as she sat on the edge of her bed. She would wait until she knew all of the members of her team were in their beds and fast asleep. Then she would steal away out of the suite, pack in tow, and make her way down to the window. She’d climb down, sneak over to the train station, find the tracks towards District Three, and be free as a bird.

So when the night fell silent, and Pixel felt like she was the only person in the Capitol that was still awake, she stood from her bed, collected her pack, and walked out the door. Pixel tiptoed carefully past Cable’s room, listening at the door for movement, then did the same for Wiress’s. Sinclair, Beetee, and Amity would be down the opposite direction and wouldn’t hear her, so she snuck further down the hall, into the main area of the suite, and into the kitchen. 

It was five feet from the door to the suite that she heard someone clear their voice. Pixel’s heart stopped and she turned.

Beetee was waiting on a sofa, stonefaced, and looking directly at her as he turned the nearest lamp on. 

“Having a midnight snack?” 


	9. Chapter 9

Pixel nearly felt her dinner from earlier come back up as she looked back at Beetee. The handmade sack of food in her hands fell to the floor, and she stood wordless.

“Come and have a seat,” he motioned towards the couch next to him. Pixel left the food where it had fallen behind the kitchen island and walked over to him. He didn’t seem to pay it any attention. “I was hoping we’d get to talk.”

Pixel still didn’t say anything, but rather took a seat on the couch and turned her head down, where she paid attention to her interlocking fingers. She’d barely made it out of the suite and she’d already been caught.

“Do you have a plan for tomorrow?” Beetee asked with no suspicion or blame in his voice. Pixel looked up in confusion.

“Um…” she trailed off without really saying anything. No, she didn’t have a plan for her private training session. She wasn’t planning on even being here for it. No part of her had even considered that she would still be there for judging by the Gamemakers. A lump rose in her throat as she realized, now that she’d been caught, there wouldn’t be another choice. “No.”

“Ah,” Beetee leaned back in his seat. “Odd. Usually tributes have an idea by now.”

Pixel bit her lip and twiddled her fingers more, not making eye contact with her mentor.

“I won’t ask why you don’t have a plan,” Beetee assured her. “That’s not my job. My job is to ready you for the arena. And the way you’ll do the best in there is by getting a high score.”

“I know,” Pixel answered softly. “I’ll figure it out.”

“I believe you,” Beetee answered, a soft smile peeking on his face. “And I encourage you to spend tonight thinking on it. It can be in your room or out here.”

“Are you not… going to tell me what to do?” Pixel asked, turning her head up to look at Beetee finally. She was still overflowing with guilt at being caught, but now some of that was being replaced by confusion. She’d always thought that out of the mentors, Wiress was the odd one. But Beetee hadn’t called attention to the fact that Pixel was attempting an escape, or asked her what she was doing out so late. He seemed to only be worried about tomorrow, and what her private training session held.

“I don’t think you’d listen if I did,” Beetee raised his eyebrows. “So I’m just going to give advice.”

He stood while Pixel remained sitting, and walked over to the kitchen island. Leaning over, he picked up the sack of food that Pixel had dropped (Pixel’s heart dropped again, as she’d hoped he hadn’t seen that) and placed it on the counter without touching any of the food inside. 

“You’re not afraid to break the rules, clearly,” he motioned to the sack. “Keep that mentality. There’s nothing worse they can do to you.”

Pixel nodded, but remained confused. 

“Good night,” Beetee said curtly, then turned towards the hall to the bedrooms. “I’d recommend staying in the suite tonight. Nothing good happens if you leave.”

How odd. Pixel remained on the couch for a few more minutes, deliberating. At this juncture there was truly nothing stopping her from stepping out that front door and making her great escape. But the way Beetee had said “nothing good” sank into her gut. Part of her believed him. And it was enough to force her up off the couch and back into her bedroom, taking the sack of food with her.

The morning of private training sessions arrived, and Pixel changed into her outfit solemnly. She couldn’t help but think about how she wasn’t supposed to be here still. If Beetee hadn’t caught her, if she’d just ignored his words and gone anyway, she’d be out of the Capitol by now. She would be following the train tracks and be on her way back to District Three. Her family would be in reach.

Beetee didn’t give any hints at breakfast that he had caught Pixel the night before, and he chit-chatted with Amity lightly about the new technologies they were bringing in for the private training sessions. They hadn’t been ready for public training, he told her, but now there were touchscreens at each station to log times and levels of difficulty, if tributes chose to use them. Pixel listened quietly; most likely the touchscreens would be coming straight from her own factory back in Three. Perhaps there would be news of her siblings, who would still be working there through the Games. 

But none came, and Pixel was sent down with Cable to wait outside the training center as soon as they had finished breakfast. 

For once, even the Careers were silent as they waited their turns. The twins went- first Praxis, then Miriam. Followed by Urban and Petra, who each had a distinct seriousness in their demeanors that took Pixel by surprise. Cable followed Petra in, and fifteen minutes later they were calling Pixel’s name.

As Pixel walked into the training center, it hit her in her stomach that she was, somehow, _still here_. Every attempt had been ruined by inconvenient chance. Her margin of error was shrinking quickly, and the possibility that she might actually be sent into the arena was simultaneously growing. 

Which meant she needed a strategy for her private training. 

A low or middle-of-the-road score would be the most obvious strategy. She hadn’t wanted to stand out so that she could more easily escape. But Pixel had been living in that space for too long now, and if she really did make it into the arena then she’d be needing sponsors. 

Which meant she needed a _good_ strategy for her private training.

Pixel couldn’t fight. Sure she’d learned a few moves during training but nothing that would significantly help her out here. So what was she good at? She was sneaky, stealthy, quick. Pixel was probably the only one here who knew how to code, and she doubted many other tributes knew the intricacies of a lot of this technology. She noted with relief that the touchscreens on the plant and throwing knife stations were nearly exactly the same as ones she had worked on in the last year. They might even have been the ones she herself had touched and assembled. 

_Break the rules. Just a little._ Pixel knew what she could do.

When Pixel walked into the room she made her way immediately over to the touchscreen next to the plants station, immediately finding the button on the right hand side to turn it on. Holding it down, she hoped it really was the same kind of machine that she’d assembled.

It was. After ten seconds of holding the button down, instead of the machine turning on its normal interface to begin training, a page of code scattered its way down the screen. Pixel smiled. It was just like home, and she suddenly felt the twitching in her fingers that she did at the factories when she was given the freedom to experiment with new lines and actions.

She thought for a second, then scrolled and highlighted a chunk of text, replacing it with different lines. She continued this several more times, then gave the screen a double tap to save, and turned the screen off. Pixel rebooted the machine, and the user interface popped up, though it was different from how it had appeared before. 

In creating these devices, Pixel knew that they were wired to connect within the mainframe of the building. She’d never had the chance to actually do what she wanted on this large of a scale because fixtures like these were meant to interact within the infrastructure of an entire building system. They’d never been fully wired together back in Three, but now they were completely in place here in the Capitol. Which meant, Pixel thought as she tapped the screen, that it was all interconnected.

This might include the ability to adjust lights, any speaker systems… anything that worked within the electrical grid of the Tower. Most of it was out of her range of abilities (there was no way she could code well enough to impact the function of the HVAC system, or make it into any locked file network with information on the Games; she certainly wouldn’t be able to get into any of the Gamemakers’ personal files or designs), but lights and sounds? Those would be easy.

Pixel swiped through the interface, bringing up another screen with scattered black and white code. This was reflected on the large screen above her, where usually there were rows of plants to identify.

She spent the next several minutes scrolling through, entering new lines and erasing unnecessary ones (truly, even if Pixel wasn’t messing with the mainframe, so many of these lines were simply redundant). She rebooted, held down the power button in a different sequence to pull up a different screen of code, just like she’d done back home to help work out its interconnectivity within the building. 

And when Pixel was finished going through it and making her edits, she rebooted once more.

All the previous information would be saved in a backup drive if the Capitol engineers had any brains, so it would only take minutes for them to return it to its regular state once she was done.

When the screen booted up, there was, once again, an interface that was different than normal. 

She hit a few spots on the screen, and a sound began from each corner of the center, too low to make out clearly. And it began growing in volume. Music was playing softly, eerily. 

The lights began to flicker. 

There was a tension that had begun to build in the ambiance and Pixel just stood there, waiting as the Gamemakers began to shift in unease. There was something that _wasn’t right_ in this center now, and they couldn’t quite decide what it was. The feel had shifted.

The lights were shutting off now, gradually across the center. Some flickered as if they were strobe lights, painting a visual of Pixel standing in the middle of the center. She was small, but looked intensely towards the Gamemakers. Music grew louder, the lights turned off one by one, the room grew darker and darker. And she stood there, staring as the lights gave an effect that made her seem to disappear from view on and off, for only split seconds.

Suddenly the fourteen-year-old was no longer a small, wide-eyed girl but a chaotic entity that was quickly shutting off light after light as the eerie music began to play louder.

It wasn’t quite the vibe that Pixel had been going for- in truth she’d just hoped to get a crescendo of music of any sort, and was happy that she’d picked the right one, and to make the lights shut off. They were supposed to go off all at once, but there must have been some backup system in place causing the flickering before they went out. 

The Gamemakers remained in place, watching the lights dance on and off, not quite calling out or cancelling anything yet. _How creative_ , Pixel figured they must be thinking. _How new_. 

The lights flickered out one by one, the music grew louder, and Pixel was suddenly hit with the realization. This was her chance.

She’d been denied attempts so many times. And it was so easy now. A distraction was all it would take, of course! 

Her eyes darted around the room as Peacekeepers looked at each other in discomfort, the music growing too loud for them to hear one another. Closely guarded by one of the Peacekeepers was an exit, definitely meant for an emergency but not clearly marked. As the lights continued to shut off one by one, the room fell into darkness, and Pixel continued to stand and stare at the Gamemakers until suddenly-

It was near total darkness, with only a single flickering bulb across the room creating any sort of light within the training center, creating a visible distraction for anyone and everyone. They’d be, quite literally, blind to anything else. With stealth Pixel leapt towards the door. 

This was the perfect moment, Pixel thought as she neared the door and slipped one foot out towards the dingy hallway it led to. Since District Three was one of the first to go into training, it could be hours until someone noticed she had left. All words of advice from her mentors slipped out of her head, all gut feelings that she shouldn’t do this and that this wasn’t right had left her mind. The door was open, and it didn’t take much to get her through.

And, suddenly, she was gone. Down a hallway in the bowels of the Capitol Tower, finally making her great escape. 

When the lights were turned on by the backup that the engineers had indeed saved, everyone else assumed that she had simply taken her leave back to the suite. There was no chance that Pixel Delaroux was now running quietly down a hallway that led to the streets of the Capitol.


	10. Chapter 10

The corridor had a clear exit at the end, with a few doors along the perimeter leading to who-knows-where. But the end of the hallway was definitely an exit. 

Pixel was thankful that her shoes were quiet enough not to make noise; she was light-footed, but even the stealthiest of kids could make a sound with heavy shoes. And the corridor was empty, as it was seemingly only a location Capitol staff used in case of an emergency. The concrete surrounding her on all sides made her think it had to be some kind of fireproof chamber, and that she had just left through a fire exit.

But thoughts aside, Pixel ran, and nobody seemed to come after her. 

Her private training session had gone about as well as she had hoped, and while she couldn’t believe it hadn’t dawned on her that this could be her escape about half an hour earlier (giving her more time to plan for what came next), it had happened. She’d made it. And as she cracked open the door to the street, Pixel breathed in the fresh air in pure relief.

The Capitol was bright. And it wasn’t just because of the sun shining over the tops of the mountains; the people were dressed in neon colors, the tallest buildings were made of glass and reflected each color and light source that bounced off their facades, the stores along the edge of the road displayed items in more colors than Pixel knew existed. 

It was overwhelming, to say the least. Pixel had seen the Capitol through the train window when she’d arrived, and she thought she knew cities because of the urbanity of District Three, but for several moments she could only stand and stare at her new surroundings. The muted colors that came through on her television at home could barely render the pure opulence that absolutely dripped from each storefront, the fluorescence of the pinks and greens decorating the hats and clothes and skin of each passerby.

She had to get going, though. If Pixel could find the station where the trains had come in, she could sneak in, crack into the computer system, find the directions to District Three, and begin the long journey home. They’d be looking for her, of course, and she’d be forced to hide along the way. But she’d frequented the survival station, was willing to break into some Capitol convenience store to get hair dye (or even razors to shave it all off), and was a master of stealth (at least back home). As the most plainly dressed person on the street, she’d have no problem blending in. 

Pixel walked down the street to the left, around the side of the Tower that she had emerged from. The train station had to be nearby, since the tributes had emerged immediately outside the front doors. Most people passed her on the street without a second glance (staying one of the more lowkey tributes certainly helped her keep a low profile; none of the Careers would have been able to walk three feet without recognition). The ones who did perform a double-take only did so briefly, as if they had seen someone vaguely familiar from their childhoods or outer social circles. Pixel was probably just the daughter of some coworker, dressed in the spirit of the Games. No tributes actually got out on the streets, after all.

But still, she decided as she walked down the street, keeping within the shadow of the building, it would be best to keep as low a profile as possible.

The Tower she had just left was larger than any building Pixel had ever seen, and in trying to walk carefully (and occasionally ducking into nooks and alleys to keep herself away from view) she was going slower than she’d hoped to. It took over half an hour just to round the corner into a street that seemed mostly empty. This way wouldn’t take as long, she figured as she continued down, walking as casually as she could.

She made her way down the path, watching as observantly as possible to the right, to the left, trying to pay attention to anything that could give her away. There seemed to be security cameras that sat perched on the street lights, though their views were locked on citizens whose outfits were more garish. They barely seemed to register the small girl walking nonchalantly through the shadows. The end of this block of the Tower was within sight, and she was sure if she rounded this corner she’d be near the train station.

Then, as she walked, Pixel turned her head to the left, and immediately stopped in place as she locked eyes with someone in a window she hadn’t expected to appear next to her. 

Pixel’s heart sank into her stomach when she recognized the Peacekeeper who had snatched her during her attempted escape straight off the train. He seemed to be eating lunch, and without hesitation he stood up out of his chair and shouted something unintelligible to those around him, pointing angrily in her direction. 

_ Shit. _

Pixel took off. Down the street, around the corner, dodging passer-bys and into alleys. She could practically hear the surveillance cameras turning to watch her, and she needed to find a spot to hide without them there to observe. Her plan had been to make it immediately to the train station, but she could camp out for a little bit first, she figured. Maybe. She continued running, hoping to outpace and dodge the Peacekeepers that were now clearly on her trail. 

Her breath grew heavy as she turned a corner into a dead-end corridor, where she backed herself into a hidden nook behind a dumpster in the hope that nobody would find her before she could make an escape. She saw no other people here, no cameras searching for her movement.

There she sat for about twenty minutes, letting her breath slow to keep anyone from hearing her, and she had hopes that they’d moved on to a different section of the city. When she’d had to run away from stalls at home she always had places to hide. The Capitol was foreign; she had no clue where she was or how she was supposed to find refuge, and she was now a fugitive from the law. 

That became all the more clear when a large white figure appeared in the entry to the alleyway.

It wasn’t a long struggle. Soon enough he had his hand wrapped around Pixel’s arm and was guiding her back to the Tower. She said nothing as she tried to wriggle out of his grasp, but it didn’t work, and after walking a long while they were entering the Tower once more. The Peacekeeper swiped a key card into a hallway meant for personnel, and continued to walk her down, taking a few more turns (that Pixel was careful to take note of) before shoving her into a windowless room and telling her to wait there.

He locked the door behind her, with only two chairs and a table that was bolted to the floor. 

After a few minutes of pacing, Pixel walked up to the door to try the knob, which was, now clearly, locked from the outside. She cursed to herself again as she went and sat in the chair that faced the door, putting her feet up on the table and making herself comfortable. 

This was a good decision. She sat there, and sat for longer. While she’d had anxiety sitting in the pit of her stomach when they’d first thrown her in here, it began to dissipate when nobody arrived as she’d expected. Pixel got antsy after the first hour, and restless after the second. She got up on the table, trying to see if there was a panel in the ceiling she could creep into, but no cigar. It seemed to be concrete, like the fire exit she had taken out of the private training session. With the chairs she might even have been able to bust through drywall (well, chairs and perhaps a little more strength than was realistic), but there was no budging in her current spot. 

Three hours, and the door finally opened. In entered a man in deep purple robes, clearly a Gamemaker who had just left private training. Pixel could only assume that the sessions had finished, District Twelve was over, and now they were coming to punish her for her escape. The anxiety returned and curled around her organs like a bad case of food poisoning.

But the man was friendly-looking, and didn’t seem angry with her. Clean-shaven and tall, with a full head of neat brown hair and a strong jawline, he had an old-school patriarchal aura around him, like the powerful factory wardens in the upper echelons of District Three. He would have looked right at home in their charcoal gray suits, smoking a cigar and drinking whiskey. He introduced himself as Caius Weatherjay and sat down at the chair across the table, reaching out to shake her hand. Pixel just stared at his outstretched arm. 

“Pixel,” he told her with a sigh, arm still outstretched. “You’re not really in a position to refuse a handshake, now are you?”

She supposed not. Pixel shook his hand.

“That was some stunt you pulled,” he told her, leaning back in the wooden chair. “I was impressed. A lot of the other Gamemakers… not so much.”

Pixel remained silent, slumped in her chair and avoiding eye contact.

“We’ve never had an escapee actually make it outside of the building before, so I have to give you kudos on that,” he said with a smile. “And at the moment where nobody would be keeping tabs on you? We thought you were on your way back to the suite, the Three team thought you were still in training. Truly remarkable. That strategic mind will suit you well in the arena, miss.”

Pixel didn’t miss the emphasis on the word “will” when he spoke of her going into the arena. It wasn’t a question of “if” anymore. 

“You know, when tributes have misbehaved before, we’ve punished them,” he mentioned. “Chopped off fingers, broken some noses, snapped toes in half…”

Pixel felt another sinking feeling in her stomach, and a primal fear began to rise. Physical torture as punishment? She hadn’t really thought about discipline or retribution, if she was being honest with herself. Consequences for potentially being caught hadn’t been something she considered. 

She hadn’t thought she’d be caught.

“But we’re not going to do that,” he said in an upbeat tone. Pixel raised an eyebrow and let herself make eye contact.

“Why?” she asked, speaking for the first time. 

“Ah, so now she speaks!” he grinned. “No, Pixel, we’re not going to hurt you. You still have your interview coming up! Nobody likes the look of a fourteen-year-old girl who’s been physically punished.”

Pixel sat up straighter in her chair. “So what are you going to do?”

“Nothing,” Caius told her calmly to Pixel’s surprise. “But I do want to mention… you have parents at home? And siblings… nine of them, I believe. Quite a large family.”

Pixel scooted forward with anxiety, knowing with a deep pit in her stomach what was coming, but hoping it wouldn’t.

“We both want to make sure they’re all safe, right?” he continued. “Now I’d like you to talk to one of your mentors. Sinclair Boone? Great guy, very smart. He can paint you a pretty good picture of what might happen if this sort of… incident were to happen again. Alright, kid?”

Caius kept a look on his face like he was a caring uncle asking Pixel if everything was okay, as if he wasn’t directly threatening the deaths of her family. Coda had turned nineteen not long ago, thinking she was finally out of the hands of the Capitol. Pass was only two, Damon only four. They were helpless, and if she did something to get them in trouble- to get them killed- Pixel had to think that was something truly horrendous. Even if she survived and made it back to District Three, there wouldn’t be a point. Not without her family.

Pixel suddenly regretted not knowing more about her own mentor as well. As far as she knew, Sinclair didn’t have a family. Granted, she didn’t know if Amity or Wiress had families, either. She hadn’t thought about them, what might have happened if they’d been suspected of helping her escape. 

How could she have been so stupid?

“What do you need from me?” she asked, letting her eyes fall to the floor again. “Just… leave my family alone. Leave Sinclair and them alone. Nobody else had anything to do with what I did.”

“Oh, they’ll be fine,” Caius assured, the same light tone inflection carrying through his voice. “We just need to make sure that you get safely into the arena, ok? Do your best in your interview, listen to your mentors, and stay safe. We wouldn’t want anything happening to you. I certainly don’t want anything happening to your family. I think it’s best for all of us if you listen and go along with us, ok?”

Pixel simply nodded, not able to garner the motivation to give him a verbal answer. Her fate was inevitable now, her future lying in whatever arena the Gamemakers had cooked up. It was all so much larger than she had thought; the machinations of the Capitol were deeper than any plan a fourteen-year-old kid from the Districts could create. There would be no outsmarting them. Because if she did outsmart them, if she did get her way and leave the Capitol, more people would be punished than she could imagine. Her family, her mentors, even Lael or the other tributes she’d trained with. Pixel imagined they even knew she’d gotten to know Cecelia and Blight. Anyone she may have touched would be in danger.

So she’d go into the arena. She would follow the orders of this Gamemaker, and she would put in the effort to fight for her life amongst twenty-three tributes that were all bigger and stronger and scarier than she was.

But as long as her family was safe, she was going to have to be ok with that.


	11. Chapter 11

The walk to the District Three suite seemed to take years. Pixel had been escorted back to the lobby of the Tribute Tower by the same Peacekeeper, and was surprised when they left her off there. Caius had seemed confident that Pixel would be making no more escape attempts, and that she could now be trusted to get to the suite by herself. He was right, of course.

It was the late afternoon. Private Training scores were due to be broadcasted later tonight. Pixel, at this juncture, didn’t particularly care about her score anymore, though she knew she should. They’d stick her with a Two or a Three, most likely, as a punishment. It would damage her reputation and destroy any chances she might have had with sponsors (not that there were many interested ones to begin with, if Lael’s mood had been any indication). Pixel would, most likely, starve to death, or die from exposure. Dehydration was pretty likely.

And what of Sinclair? Was it wise for Pixel to ask what Caius had hinted at? Would it be more tactful to approach Wiress or Beetee with her questions?

No, she decided. While she didn’t particularly want to know what was potentially in store for her family, it was important that she be prepared, that she know what exactly the Capitol was capable of.

Pixel smiled gently when she entered the suite, and the Three team simply looked up in surprise when she entered.

“She’s here,” Amity smiled in relief. She sat in the dining area, her wheelchair carefully tucked into the table where she had been working on a bowl of soup. “Thank goodness, dear, they told us-”

“They told us you were fine,” Beetee cut in towards Amity. His face was calm, as usual, but there was a tension in his eyes that Pixel could feel from across the room. “Pixel, it would be nice if you’d tell us what’s happened. We got word after your private training that you were being held by the Gamemakers for a little while.”

There seemed to only be three mentors here in the main room of the Three suite. Wiress was curled up in a ball near the steel fireplace, focused on the flames dancing up the hearth, and Pixel couldn’t imagine where Sinclair and Lael and Cable were. 

“They told us not to worry,” Wiress remarked calmly. She turned her head towards Beetee and pulled a strand of curly hair out of her braid. “You forgot that. I wasn’t worried. They usually tell the truth to us.”

“Indeed,” Beetee responded tensely. “Now I don’t like to-”

“Where’s Sinclair?” Pixel interrupted. Beetee blinked a couple of times in surprise, then pulled his hands down to his knees and sat up straight. 

“In his bedroom,” he answered. “He went there when they let us know you’d be late.”

“Ok,” Pixel answered, reaching to scratch the back of her head. “Um, I’ll tell you guys what happened, but… But I want to talk to him first, if that’s ok.”

Amity returned to her soup as Beetee gave Pixel a nod. “His room is the last one on the right.”

Pixel turned, and walked straight down the hall, avoiding any more conversation.

She knocked twice, heard a gentle “ _ come in _ ”, and opened the door. In the room was the burly victor perched carefully on the edge of his bed. His black hair was more tousled than she’d ever seen it, and he was running a hand through his thick beard, staring at the wall intensely. When Pixel entered the room he looked up, and his entire body seemed to relax within half a second. 

“Pixel,” he breathed and smiled. “Oh, thank… I’m sorry, I was…”

The man was normally so larger than life, his voice carrying across any room he took up. Pixel had never seen him like this, almost small and meek. 

“I escaped,” Pixel spoke the words for the first time. She hadn’t realized her body was shaking until she heard it in her voice, and she began fidgeting with her fingers. “Um, they caught me but they didn’t… try… I’m ok, if that’s what you’re wondering.”

Sinclair closed his eyes for a second and let out a long breath. His shoulders fell, then raised again as he opened his eyes once more.

“That’s good,” Sinclair answered. “I was… I was worried. You know, you’d think that after twenty years I wouldn’t get attached. I’ve seen so many of my kids get killed, but there’s a new sort of terror that happens when I don’t know what’s happened before they even get into the arena.”

Guilt dropped like a rock into Pixel’s stomach. 

“I’m sorry, I-” Pixel had to stop when the words started to get caught in her throat. She realized, for the first time since getting reaped, that tears were beginning to form in her eyes.  _ No _ , she didn’t want to cry. That was the last thing she wanted in this discussion. But try as she might to blink them away, they were coming. Quickly, she wiped away the first one to fall onto her cheek. 

“Oh, Pixel,” Sinclair stood and closed the gap between them, drawing her into an embrace. Pixel hadn’t been held like this since her family’s goodbye back in District Three, and the very touch of someone who seemed to care about her made all of this seem just a little better. 

She didn’t want to let go, but she needed to discuss what Caius had told her. 

“I was… I was caught, obviously,” she got out, furiously wiping tears from her eyes as Sinclair sat back down on his bed to maintain level eye contact with her. “Um, I wanted to talk to you, specifically. They said… they said if I did anything else, they’d hurt my family. And they… they wanted me to talk to you.”

Sinclair’s face darkened and he looked away from his tribute. 

“I see,” he answered. “They’re not joking, you know. That wasn't an empty threat.”

“I know,” Pixel answered, standing with statue-like stillness. “I believe them, but… I feel like I need to know what they could do.”

Sinclair swallowed. He paused a minute, thinking, then spoke with a metallic tenor to his voice. “Do you know about the rebellion brewing in the districts?”

Pixel, mildly surprised, shook her head. Rebellion was a joke for school kids, something to be shushed by teachers.

“It was something I was very much a part of,” he told her. “I wanted the end of the Games, the dissolution of the Capitol, the whole thing. I dedicated my life to it. And, long story short, the Capitol found out.”

Pixel didn’t say anything, but walked over to the bed to sit beside Sinclair. The man put his hand on her shoulder for a second, then returned it to his knee. 

“The thing about victors is that they like to parade us around like trophies,” he told Pixel somberly. “I’m not really going to get into the weeds here but, essentially, they like to keep us looking perfect for the crowds. The ultimate celebrities, everything the people in the Capitol want to believe can come from the Districts. So we… kind of cannot be touched, in a way.”

He paused for a second, then opened his mouth to speak again, this time with a tinge of pain in his voice. 

“Our families and loved ones, on the other hand,” he continued. “Are pretty much fair game. The Capitol learned I had participated in rebellion, and when they couldn’t come for me, they went after my family. They rigged the Reaping the next year and sent my little sister into the Games. She was about your age, but… not nearly as resourceful. She died early. Then my parents died of mysterious causes. Several years later, I had fallen in love. My… my soon-to-be husband disappeared a couple of weeks before the wedding.”

Pixel simply nodded and listened with intense fear. If she had gotten away with her escape, if she were out in the wilderness right now, there was no question. The pictures were clear in her mind. Her parents dead, all nine siblings sent to the community home. One Delaroux kid after another mysteriously reaped into the Games. It was a fate worse than death for the fourteen-year-old.

"He reappeared," Sinclair continued, to Pixel's surprise. "Here. And... I still have to see him very, very occasionally. When the Capitol wants to remind me about consequences. You know about Avoxes, I assume. They ripped out his tongue and are forcing him to serve rich Capitolites for the rest of his life. All because of my stupid actions. Haven't seen him in... a while now, though."

Pixel sat in shocked horror. She herself was currently being paraded around before her own inevitable death, and she'd thought that had to be the most despicable thing the Capitol could do. But to torment people who did nothing wrong- nothing _actually_ wrong- for the rest of their lives was incomprehensible to her.

“Oh,” Pixel answered solemnly. “That’s… I’m really sorry, Sinclair.”

It didn't feel like enough, but it was all she had in her to say to him.

He turned to look at her, then shook his head. “Nothing to be sorry for.”

“No, there is,” Pixel retorted. “If I’d escaped, if I’d made it out, then they would’ve hurt you guys more. The Gamemaker made that really clear, and I’m sorry I almost put you in that position.”

For the first time Sinclair let out a bit of a laugh. Pixel raised her eyebrows in surprise.

“Kid,” he told her. “Trust me. The four of us would’ve been fine. Out of anyone that you should feel worried about, it’s yourself. I mean, what the hell kind of training score are they going to give an act like that? I think I’m going to have my work cut out for me with sponsors from now on, but you… you’ve gotta keep it together, ok?”

Pixel nodded. The next day would be interviews with Caesar Flickerman, the announcer of the Games. After that it would be open season on her; she’d have to really convince the Gamemakers and the Capitol that she was serious about going into the arena and doing well. 

“I promised Beetee I’d tell the rest of them what happened,” she stood up slowly, then walked towards the door. Sinclair stood up behind her.

“Well I sure as hell want to hear this story,” he held the door open for her and followed her down the hall.

Out of the remaining three victors, shockingly Amity was the one who seemed the most excited by the story that Pixel had told. The girl recounted what she did for her training session, her escape, how she got caught. While she didn’t go into details about Caius’s threats to her, she mentioned that she’d gotten a slap on the wrist and a severe warning by the Gamemakers. Amity was engrossed.

“Nothing exciting ever happens anymore,” she explained as she reached for a bowl of rice across the table, then began spooning it into her soup, which wafted a thick scent of sausage and spices. “It’s always so predictable now.”

Beetee and Wiress seemed far more worried than their older colleague. While Wiress was worried that they might hurt her tribute, Beetee simply suggested that Pixel listen to his advice from now on. He’d thought he had quashed the escape idea, he admitted, when he caught her sneaking out the night before. Wiress and Amity didn’t seem surprised by the mention of it, as it seemed he’d already told them. Sinclair just laughed again.

“How many times have you tried to escape now?” he asked as he pulled up a chair next to Amity. 

Pixel did some mental math. “Um… five, I think. If you count me trying to use the Peacekeeper’s key to leave the Justice Building.”

Sinclair just laughed. The mood had brightened significantly, and when Lael returned to the suite with Cable in tow (she explained that she was showing him the roof so he might get some fresh air), the group sat for dinner before scores were announced.

Caesar Flickerman sported highlighter-yellow hair and eyebrows this year, and sat alone at a desk with a large screen beside him. While the Three team sat in the living room with baited breath, he adjusted a stack of papers and announced that the training sessions had been scored, and that sponsors should be champing at the bit to get a look at this year’s crop of tributes.

Praxis Opal’s face appeared on the screen, the boy from One starting off the night. His face blinked for a few seconds before the number  _ 7 _ appeared below it. Pixel tilted her head. She’d only seen the guy in action with his sister; perhaps he was less impressive as a solo act. Then again, a 7 was still nothing to scoff at. Most non-Careers tended to score 5 or below. 

Then Miriam’s face lit up the screen, and the much more expected  _ 10 _ appeared underneath. 

Both tributes from Two showed up with the number _ 9 _ , a formidable score that would be sure to attract sponsors. 

Cable’s face appeared for a few seconds, the pale, sallow skin on his cheeks a sharp contrast to the healthy faces of the Careers that preceded him. The room held their breath until Caesar announced the number  _ 5 _ for him.

The mentors nodded. It wasn’t a terrible score. Surely Pixel would be earning something far worse, and his score would look excellent in comparison. Wiress patted Cable’s shoulder to comfort the boy, who seemed disappointed in himself, as the team focused back to the screen.

Pixel’s face appeared, grinning and wide-eyed like Lael had suggested on the day they took their photos and promotional videos. All the tributes who had come before her were at least three years older, and in comparison she looked like a baby. Which would make it seem reasonable when her score was low.

“Pixel Delaroux,” Caesar announced, pausing for a second. He turned his eyes back at the camera, a hint of mischief coming through the cameras. “ _ Ten _ .”

Ten? 

Pixel smiled broadly, Sinclair and Amity cheered out loud, Cable sunk in on himself. Ten. They thought she was a competitor. She might get some sponsors now. 

She let that thought follow her as scores continued to be announced. 8 and 9 for the pair from Four, 7 for the girl from Five, 3 for the boy from Seven, 5 for Georgia, 9 for Isadora, she let her eyes follow excitedly as they finished out with a 4 for the girl from Twelve. And then it was over, and Pixel smiled for another second before the realization hit her. 

She was tied for the highest score with Miriam from One.

There would be no flying under the radar now. The Gamemakers had made sure of that. Spotlights would be turned on her, questions about what exactly she did to earn her high score, articles about the mystery of the kid from Three. And that wasn’t even the half of it when it came to the arena. There was no way the Career pack would be happy about this.

Pixel could already see Miriam, not much taller than her but flexible and balanced and deadly, pouncing at her from behind like a cat. Her brother Praxis working in careful tandem, driving blades into Pixel’s flesh. Petra tearing her apart limb from limb, the duo from Four going after her like a couple of hyenas, all while Urban waited patiently to take the final blow. 

_ Don’t cross my crew _ , he’d told her. 

Pixel Delaroux, though small and young, was now a threat. And those in charge would be more than willing to capitalize on that.


	12. Chapter 12

Timon, her stylist, put Pixel in a two-piece outfit for her interview. First was a pink crop top, silk and loose. On her bottom half was a flowing, navy blue skirt with a floral pattern. Her hair was first straightened to eliminate its natural waves, then curled in a way that was more careful than it had ever been handled (Pixel preferred to either let her hair fall loose in front of her face to detract attention, or to pull it back in a low knot to keep it out of her face and off her neck). It sat long enough to fall several inches past her shoulders, flowing past the thick golden necklace that adorned her throat.

Lael had tried several times to coach Pixel how to walk in high heels, and though the tribute gave it a concerted effort, it was not something she was going to learn in a couple of hours before her interview. Besides, she was starting to sweat through the makeup that the prep team had polished onto her face, so they pulled out some pink ballet flats that laced up her ankles and halfway up her calves.

Pixel knew the basics of makeup from her older sister, even if it didn’t interest her all that much. India had crafted her own eyeliner and blush at home from natural materials, and Pixel had let her experiment new pigments on her face when Coda was tired of being her guinea pig. What she didn’t realize was that it had a  _ purpose _ . Now that professionals had gotten their hands on her face, she was barely recognizable when she saw herself in the mirror. While her bold freckles weren’t entirely camouflaged, they were certainly lessened under the thick ivory-colored cream that had been applied on top of them. The powder on her eyes somehow made them look bluer than they had been yesterday, and the black stuff from a tube they’d swiped onto her eyelashes made them look twice as big. They handed her another tube of the gloss they’d applied to her lips in case it wore off before she was due to be on camera. 

Sinclair, who was by far the most charismatic of the four District Three victors, had coached Pixel and Cable that morning on how best to charm the cameras. Eye contact with emcee Caesar Flickerman and looking out to the audience would help them relate. Pixel should always be smiling, while Cable should remain stoic, for the sake of the characters they were portraying to the country. He warned that Pixel would probably be asked what she did for her private training and that she should, under no circumstances, tell the truth. That much would be easy, she figured.

When the time came, and Pixel was lined up behind Urban, somehow she could only think of home. 

In the past thirty-six hours, she’d gone from avoiding thoughts about her family, to being drenched in guilt for putting them in danger, to now having an itchy curiosity about how they were responding to her actions. Surely her parade appearance was fairly standard; she hadn’t done much out of the ordinary throughout it. But to see that Pixel had scored a 10 in training? 

No doubt Vista wouldn’t be surprised. Her younger sister had always looked up to Pixel far more than she should have, and tended to greatly overestimate her abilities. That was amplified by Pixel’s tendency to boast about herself to people she knew well and was comfortable with. Her parents and older siblings would be shocked, as they probably held much more realistic expectations for their fourteen-year-old.

“You ok?” Pixel heard the soft voice ask, and she turned her head up to see Urban, standing about a foot taller than her, looking carefully. She cocked her head to the side. 

“Yeah,” she responded, though it sounded more like a question. Why was Urban still talking to her? She’d shown him up in private training; hell, she’d shown up most of the Career pack. Pixel’s eyes darted back behind him for half a second to see Miriam Opal glaring daggers at her, her brother Praxis holding a hand on her shoulder but still looking as if he’d smelled something bad. Suddenly Pixel was relieved that Urban was the only Career she was standing next to at the moment; any of the others may have handed her a broken nose just before her interview. “Why do you ask?”

Urban crossed his arms, and his eyes hardened a bit as he looked away from Pixel. “Going for such a high score wasn’t smart. Not if you were taking my advice.”

Pixel’s face scrunched a bit in disbelief. Sure, the score was meant to have this exact effect by the Gamemakers, but that didn’t mean that Pixel didn't have the right to be proud of it. “The world doesn’t revolve around your Career pack. I’m not going to make myself smaller or weaker than I already am just to cater to your friends' insecurities.”

Urban looked a little taken aback and looked back at Pixel as Caesar Flickerman loudly took the stage. Applause rose from the audience, and it could be clearly heard from the wings where the group of tributes waited. 

“Those are some big, strong words for someone who’s trying to act like a helpless little kid,” his mouth turned up into a small smile, and Pixel glanced up to see Petra standing in front of him, clearly eavesdropping but not letting reactions betray her. The District Two girl turned back and Pixel took a deep breath.

Miriam walked onto the stage- the first of the night- and the line moved forward as the screens in front of them displayed her entrance. The tiny Career was dressed in a flowy pink minidress that was absolutely glaring in gold accents. Somehow she shone brighter on the stage than Caesar with his bright yellow hair. 

“Well I think my score kind of ruined the ‘helpless little kid’ thing,” Pixel answered softly, biting her lip as Miriam began immediately charming the audience with wit and humor. 

Urban simply turned back around, and Pixel dared a glance back at Cable, who had his eyes trained on the screen, studying the girl’s movements and speech with intent.

The four in front of her each had their acts. After Miriam was Praxis, who was now funny and joking with the audience. He rattled several jokes off the top of his head, ensuring people would be rooting for him to last a while just for the entertainment value. Petra, unsurprisingly, was still and quiet and terrifying. Her dark hair was slicked back and her arms were once again bare to display the contoured muscles that she had worked so hard to build. Urban, like Miriam, was witty and charming, and Caesar made several comments about his good looks that made the audience applaud several times. 

“ _ This little lady is all the Capitol could talk about last night! _ ” the bright, ringing voice sounded from the stage. “ _ Please welcome, from District Three, Pixel Delaroux! _ ”

And then it was her turn, and she was carefully walking onto the stage and greeting Caesar Flickerman for the first time. 

In truth, the last thing she wanted was an interview. She’d accepted her fate yesterday, barely able to sleep from the stress and worried about whether or not her participation in the Games was actually keeping her family safe. What was to keep them from forcing Pixel to behave and then going to Three and hurting her family anyway?

But she had to retain hope. So Pixel painted that same big fake smile on her face that had become her lasting Capitol facade, and waved out to the screaming audience when she took center stage. Her score had probably screwed her, yes, but the plus side of it was that sponsors were now eyeing her carefully. She now just had to sell them on the idea that she was a force to be reckoned with.

“Pixel, it is lovely to meet you,” Caesar started as they both took their seats. “Tell me, how are you liking the Capitol so far? Different from District Three?”

Pixel carefully perched on her seat. How had she liked the Capitol? She was pretty sure her training incident had answered that question for her. Still, though, she felt that what the audience wanted was for her to gush, to be absolutely over-the-moon with love for them and their home. “The Capitol is amazing. Very different from Three, but in a good way! I love getting to see all these new things and meet so many new people.”

“I’m  _ sure _ it is,” he agreed. “And we’re so excited to have you here, too!” Caesar turned to the cameras, gesturing to Pixel at his side. “She’s so cute! Isn’t she cute?” Caesar asked the crowd, who agreed with a happy cheer. 

Turning back to Pixel, Caesar leaned forward, elbow resting on his knee. “Now, miss Pixel. We’ve got to talk about what’s been on everyone’s minds. You got a Ten in training! I’ve got to tell you that was the best surprise we’ve seen here in  _ ages _ . Tell me, can we have just a little sneak peek into what went on in that training room?”

The audience cheered loudly, egging her on to share.

“Thank you!” Pixel grinned and waved out to the crowd. That was it, she was now getting back into rhythm. She was cute. She’d always been cute, and that had been her selling point so many times that it had to work now. 

“I did get a Ten,” Pixel repeated, letting a blush creep to her cheeks, trying not to let the dread of what the other tributes must be thinking creep into her mind. The Careers she’d just followed had to be watching in the back, seething as they saw an impoverished fourteen-year-old take the spotlight they’d been working towards for years. “I don’t know if I’m allowed to give a sneak peek! You’d have to ask the Gamemakers.”

Pixel paused for a second, biting her lip. “I honestly thought I wouldn’t get a high score, though. I thought they’d be mad at me because my training was… a little different. But apparently they weren’t, so thank you, Gamemakers!”

They clearly  _ were _ mad at her- the thought was sitting at the front of her mind- but playing up the innocent act could only help her at this juncture, Pixel figured. She waved out to the audience with a huge, fake smile, as if she was directly giving thanks to the people who had condemned her to death.

“We’re just going to have to wait to see your tricks, then!” Caesar chuckled. “Our Gamemakers love to keep their secrets. Now, with a score like Ten, I’m sure your family is very proud of you! Who is cheering for you back home in Three?”

Oh good. Back home was easy.

“I have a  _ big _ family back home in Three,” she replied, smiling. Surely it would take up some time to talk about them all. She could distract easily from any of her troublemaking, and perhaps it would make the time go faster so she wouldn’t have to stay up here for much longer. 

“So I have my mom and my dad. And then two older sisters, Coda, who’s nineteen, and India, who’s seventeen. Then there’s my older brother Rom, who’s sixteen. And then younger than me is my sister Vista, who’s thirteen. Below her are two brothers, Linus, who’s eleven, and Page, who’s nine. And then the youngest girl is Canta, who’s six. And then finally below her are the last two boys, Damon, who’s four, and Pass who’s two.”

As Pixel rattled off her siblings, Caesar kept count, holding up his fingers as he kept track of just how many siblings Pixel had. He made impressed and surprised faces as he did so, his over-the-top expressions causing laughter from the crowd. 

“My goodness!” Caesar exclaimed. “That’s quite the family! I’ll have to remember to bring… eleven gifts when I hopefully go to visit for your family interview!”

He smiled. “Well, Pixel, if you’d like, you can look right into that camera, right there…” he pointed into the main camera in front of them, waving a little. “Hello, Delaroux clan! And you can say hello all the way back to District Three! Is there anything you’d like to say to your family tonight?”

It hit Pixel again that her family would be out there watching somewhere, and she was filled with… something. Hope? Fear? Perhaps a little bit of comfort in the fact that she had the opportunity to speak to them directly for the first time since leaving home. But this wasn’t for them, really. It was for the sponsors. 

“Hi everyone!” she waved with a smile, keeping her eyes wide in the desperate hope that her family could see just how unhappy she was to be here. Vista would know. Her sister could always read her face. “I miss you, I hope I get to see you soon! And if you ever hear about what happened in my private training, go ahead and ground me when I get back.”

The audience laughed at her little jibe, and Pixel forced herself to turn away from the camera.

Caesar made a surprised face into the camera as Pixel revealed even just a tiny bit of her private training. “I don’t know, can mom and dad ground a Victor?” he asked with a laugh. 

Noting the time on the countdown, Caesar smiled at Pixel. “Well, little miss Pixel, our time together is drawing to a close! I have one more question for you. When you’re in the Arena, what is your biggest inspiration to get home? What will you think of on those long nights?”

She laughed again, and felt a wave of relief wash over her. The thing she wanted more than anything right now was to get off this stage, with the massively uncomfortable spotlight shining in her face. “Oh no! I thought we were just getting started.”

“My biggest inspiration to get home?” she repeated. How about not dying at the hands of another teenager? “Everything, I guess. I love it at home. As cool as the Capitol is, I like being at home with my family. And of course all of them are a big inspiration for me. If you need me to remind you of their names, I can!”

The audience applauded and Caesar got up to say goodbye to her.

“Well our three minutes are up, I’m afraid!” he said as he took her hand to pull her out of her seat. “This was Pixel, our little underdog from District Three!” 

Pixel thanked him and the crowd, then gratefully exited, exhausted from her minutes in the limelight.

She didn’t bother watching Cable as she stood in the wings on the sidelines. All she could do at this moment was feel the weight of the Hunger Games sitting in the pit of her stomach. She’d be going into the arena tomorrow, and there was nothing more she’d be able to do about it.


	13. Chapter 13

Pixel sat beside Wiress late into the night while the mentor brushed her hair, singing about her pretty red locks and braiding, then unbraiding. The television was on, showing recaps of the interviews and hosting discussions about each tribute. Caesar Flickerman sat in a small studio next to a few glamorously-dressed women of ambiguous age. If Pixel could guess, she would have said they were in their thirties or forties, but there was so much age-defying surgery, so many creams and bits of technology available to hide the actual ages of women here, that it was beyond her how old these large-lipped, smooth-skinned people actually were.

Mostly they spent time chatting about the Careers, of course. They all fawned over Urban, telling Caesar how they’d each like a bite of him if he came out of the arena, and Caesar laughed back and told them to watch out, the kid was only seventeen. The tutted that away, and said similar sentiments about the golden boy Praxis, who, along with his sister, was apparently eighteen. They didn’t have much to say about the girls, which made Pixel mildly uncomfortable, as their remarks about the boys- which now included the boy from Four (Martel, they said his name was)- grew more and more raunchy.

Sinclair was watching from the next sofa over and wrinkled his nose in disgust. 

“Children,” he shook his head as he sat back. “Grown women fighting over who gets first crack at a kid.”

“First crack?” Pixel asked. Would they be letting these Capitol women hit or punch whoever came out as victor? That didn’t make sense.

“It’s a saying here,” Sinclair shook his head again. “You don’t need to worry about it. Just a bunch of predatory cougars waiting to pounce. Despicable.”

“Careful!” Amity hushed him from across the room, where she sat at the dining table again. It seemed to be her favorite place to park her wheelchair, and this time she nursed a glass of red wine along with a dark meat stew. “Don’t go insulting people when you know very well what might-”

“I know, Am,” he lifted his hand in the air as if to wave her comments away.

Cable sat at the table across from Amity, his ashy complexion even paler than usual. He poked his fork at his helping of stew, filled with chunks of meat glazed in a dark brown sauce and mingled with potatoes and carrots. Beetee stood just past them, leaning against the kitchen counter with arms folded and his typical stony expression. He didn’t watch the television, where the women were now making crude gestures at the faces of boy tributes who appeared on the screen next to them. The angry boy from Seven appeared, hair straggling down his face in his picture, his eyes glaring at the camera.

“ _ So moody _ ,” one of the women crooned. “ _ I’m sure I could cheer him up, just get in there and get my hands on his- _ ”

“Well,” Beetee said, reaching up to adjust his glasses. “I’ve been sufficiently… entertained. By this program at the least. Sinclair, could you-”

“I’m not turning off the TV,” Sinclair answered, stroking a hand through his beard. “I’ll change the channel but I want to keep myself in the loop for what people are thinking. Those women are disgusting but they’re big contributors of sponsor money and you know that.”

“Women?” Wiress asked, seemingly taking notice of the television for the first time. “Oh. I don’t like them.”

“Can we at least watch something other than middle-aged women sexualizing teen boys who are about to fight to the death?” Beetee asked, not mincing his words. 

Oh. Pixel understood now. While she’d gotten the gist that these women weren’t being particularly appropriate about the boys on the screen, she realized she could now put a finger on just what made her so uncomfortable about it. 

Sinclair picked up the remote control and switched to a different channel, where the in-arena announcer for the Games, Claudius Templesmith, sat with two Gamemakers. One, Sinclair explained, was Desdemona, the Head Gamemaker. She’d been in power for about six years now, and she sat tall and regal, with lavender hair that was cut in a harsh bob with blunt bangs, her face gaunt and pale. 

Next to her was a familiar face in Caius Weatherjay.

“That’s the Gamemaker who-” Pixel pointed, then shut her mouth. She wasn’t sure if Cable knew about her exploits, whether Lael- who was seated quietly in the furthest armchair of the room typing away at a computer- was aware of her misdeeds. She’d told Sinclair, and then after that had given a shortened version to the other mentors, but that was it. “That’s the Gamemaker I met. After, uh… Private Training.”

“Ah. Caius,” Beetee nodded. “No wonder you were set straight. The Weatherjays up there aren’t anyone to mess with.”

“Weatherjays?” Pixel asked. “Both of them?”

Wiress pulled Pixel’s hair back softly, combing her fingers through it again before beginning a more intricate braid. 

“The demonic duo!” Sinclair responded, lifting himself from his seat to walk to the refrigerator. He opened the door, pulled out a bottle that Pixel guessed was filled with beer, and twisted the top off. “Yeah. Married couple. No wonder they found each other. Couple of fucked-up-”

“ _ Sinclair! _ ” Amity cut in again. Her eyes had hardened behind her spectacles, and she looked at him with intense seriousness. Wiress began humming softly to herself as she pulled a strand of hair that she’d missed back from Pixel’s face. 

Lael, who hadn’t spoken, looked up and reached one hand towards her ear. She adjusted her fingers for a second, then brought her hand back down with a small device that was playing faint music. Pixel hadn’t seen the earbuds earlier, and she realized that’s why the chirpy escort hadn’t interjected yet. 

“Everything okay?” she asked softly before closing her laptop. Wiress and Pixel both nodded yes and she smiled. “Excellent.”

She stood and held the computer under one arm, picking up a notebook and set of pens with the other hand. “I’m going to go to my room to finish my work tonight. There’s a lot of logistical stuff I have to work out for tomorrow.”

None of the other members of the team answered her as she skittered away, her flowy pink dress trailing behind her. The remaining people in the room sat quietly as Claudius interviewed the two Gamemakers, who gave statements that were vague, yet mildly terrifying. They spoke of the tributes as if they were numbers, horses to be bet upon. There were numbers that scrolled across the bottom of the screen that didn’t make a whole lot of sense to Pixel, but she had an inkling that “ _ D3F: 1:70 _ ” had something to do with her.

“We’re finding there will probably be  _ many _ surprises this year,” Desdemona spoke, her voice stoic and taciturn. “Of course, the outlying districts have a good chance every year, statistically. And there have already been some standouts that we weren’t expecting.”

“You’re speaking, of course, about the high scores coming out of Districts Three and Eleven?” Claudius asked, shuffling a stack of papers he was keeping near his chair. 

“Of course,” Caius responded with a smile. “As well as some other, uh… hidden gems I think, who are going to show off what they’ve got. Training scores aren’t necessarily the be-all and end-all of great gameplay. I mean, we all watched the interviews. We’ve already got come crowd favorites coming from Two, Five, Seven, and Ten.”

Pixel thought back to the other tributes, realizing she hadn’t paid much attention beyond the Careers and the two others she’d trained with. Though she hadn’t watched Cable’s interview, or those from District Four, Lael had insisted that she watch the rest, and Pixel was forced to think back. The girl from Five, with her big glasses and bangs, had been quirky and upbeat, spending her time talking about electricity and the big storms that ran through her district. The boy from Seven had barely answered the questions asked of him, choosing to sulk and spit out one-syllable answers to Caesar. And Georgia, expectedly, had been bubbly and charming, letting her cute accent and optimistic demeanor win over the audience. 

She didn’t like to think about that. Pixel was hit in the chest with the hollow realization that she probably could’ve gotten an alliance out of Georgia, though Isadora from Eleven may have rebutted that. She would be going into the arena alone. Even Cable, no doubt, had a plan at the ready. He didn’t seem to be attached to the Careers, as Pixel had assumed from the presence of Brutus in the Three suite, but he wouldn’t be dragging a kid along with him for his no-doubt genius plan to make it through the arena. 

Suddenly nausea was hitting Pixel in place of that hollow feeling, and she had to get up from the sofa. She pulled a hand up to catch Wiress, who was braiding small strands of hair down the side of her head. 

“Can I go on a walk, or something?” she asked. Wiress pulled her hand out of Pixel’s hair and didn’t respond. Beetee raised his eyebrows.

“A walk?” he repeated. Pixel knew where his mind was going.

“I won’t be gone long. I promise. I’m not going to-” Pixel stuttered a bit, then bit her lip. Her mentors knew that she understood the consequences of escaping better than anyone. “I just need to walk around. I’m not feeling… great.”

“Understandable,” Sinclair let out a soft and dark chuckle. “Go on. You’ll probably be able to access the roof, if you want. Sometimes tributes make their way up there to meet or decompress or whatever. Take the elevator to the Twelfth floor and climb the ladder to your right.”

Pixel nodded, liking this idea. Getting outdoors would be good for her. She stood and exited the suite, following the directions given to her by Sinclair. 

The night air was cooler and drier here than it was back in District Three. There, the summer nights were humid and calm thanks to the lake. Fireflies danced in the courtyards of apartment buildings and kids would be running around catching them while exhausted parents watched from their windows or balconies. 

There was a lake near the Capitol, too, Pixel noticed in the distance. It sat opposite the end of the city where the mountains crested the horizon. She didn’t feel close enough to it to feel any effect on her skin or the night air, but it was nice.

Pixel walked to the edge of the building, having to take a few steps down to reach the sitting area where she only assumed dozens of tributes before her had sat and accepted their own inevitable deaths. And while she didn’t want to do that- she didn’t want to lay down and die and let the Capitol kill her and send her home in a body bag- she began to feel her own inept smallness in the grand scale of Panem. She was the youngest tribute this year at fourteen years old. She was the smallest. And this city- this country- seemed to be built on the deaths of hundreds of small people like her. She was only one of many.

A fourteen-year-old had never won the Games before, and it was designed to keep it that way. 

Pixel took another couple of steps to the edge of the building, reaching a hand out. She remembered Cecelia telling her about the forcefield that they had built around the rooftop, and carefully reached her hand out beyond the perimeter of the building. Sure enough, just as had happened when she’d attempted her escape from the train, Pixel was met with a small shock and drew her hand away.

A metallic  _ clang _ sounded from the doorway, and Pixel nearly jumped out of her shirt in shock. Before whoever was entering could get further onto the roof, she scrambled over to a small corner, where she curled herself into a ball to hide out of habit.

“ _ There will be many surprises this year _ ,” she heard a high pitched voice grumble. “There better not be any fucking surprises!  _ We _ were supposed to be the surprise!”

Pixel dared to turn her head around the corner, where she saw the tiny Miriam Opal entering the roof, jaw set and eyes practically flaring red. She was talking to someone, who Pixel could only assume was her brother. 

“Mir, chill,” his voice sounded from a spot that Pixel couldn’t see, and she turned back so that she wouldn’t risk being seen. “You got the highest score. There aren’t going to be any surprises.”

“ _ Tied _ for the highest score, Prax!” her voice was nearly frantic. “Tied with a fucking twelve-year-old! Or thirteen, or whatever the fuck age she is! A little kid! Were the Gamemakers just trying to fuck with us or…”

“Hey, that’s better than I got!” he responded. “They basically insulted me to my face with that Seven! But you don’t see me throwing a fit over it.”

“I’m not  _ throwing a fit _ ,” Miriam answered, her voice cooling and leveling out. “I’m being prepared. Clearly they’re trying out some shit this year and I don’t want to fall victim to it. Prax, every year they pull something that causes one or two of us who are  _ actually prepared for the Games _ to be killed in stupid ways. We’ve trained for this our whole lives, I’m not going to let… a… a mutt or a rockslide or something take us down because the Gamemakers got trigger happy! And if you add in that there can only be one winner…”

She trailed off.

“We’ve talked about this,” Praxis answered, his voice set and grounded. Pixel dared another look, seeing that the two of them had taken a seat on a ledge near the stairs. Miriam’s face was bright red and splotchy, and though Pixel couldn’t detect any tears there was certainly the presence of distress written across her face. Praxis, blonde and pale, had a face as set and hard as she’d ever seen a Career’s. “It wasn’t our decision to make.”

“If the trainers had just let you volunteer last year like we’d planned!”

“But they didn’t,” he answered. Pixel drew her head back into her corner. “They said they’re trying out some new strategies with siblings. Maybe in the future they’ll let some other pair go in one after the other but this year it’s you and me.”

The two sat in silence for a couple of minutes, and Pixel realized she’d been holding her breath while listening. 

“Can we go inside now?” Praxis asked. “Since you’re done yelling, apparently? I’m getting cold.”

Pixel turned her head back around again to see Miriam nodding, and he took the lead, stood, and walked slowly back towards the door. Miriam’s small face was set again, her face hard and determined as she turned her head to the left. 

Suddenly, her eyes met Pixel’s, and Pixel realized she’d been caught. Her heart stopped in her chest as her eyes widened, preparing to have to pull another “innocent child” act. As if that would work after the score she’d received. But Miriam stood still, staring daggers into her eyes. 

“You know what?” Miriam said, her brother freezing at the doorframe. She spoke directly to Pixel. “No. Nothing’s changing this year. We’ve trained our whole lives. No little… lesser district kids or stupid Gamemakers are going to change that.”

“Sure thing,” he answered as he exited the rooftop. “Come on, Mir. They’ll be wondering where we are.”

Miriam broke her eye contact with Pixel, and followed her brother, leaving the smaller girl alone on the roof. 

And Pixel, more than ever before, was left terrified of what would follow within the next day.


	14. Chapter 14

“You’re going to be great,” Sinclair assured Pixel as he led her out towards the waiting hovercraft. Cable walked behind them, with Amity wheeling along beside him. Wiress and Beetee brought up the rear of their little party. “I don’t want either of you going into the Cornucopia. That’s a one-way ticket to your cannon firing and telling everyone you’re dead. And that’s the last thing any of us want.”

Pixel nodded, not opening her mouth in the fear that she might let loose her breakfast from this morning. She wore only jeans and a loose tank top; Lael had told her that Timon would be waiting for her below the arena and she’d get changed into her Games uniform there. She had left the group of them at the door from the Tribute Tower, giving Pixel a big hug that was oddly reassuring. 

“We’ll do our damnedest to get you two some sponsor gifts as soon as possible,” Sinclair continued, turning back to look at Cable. “The gifts get more expensive by the minute in the arena, and Pixel’s training score has managed to garner a little bit of interest in our team, so I’m going to try to get you guys some stuff while they’re still affordable. If those gifts come with notes from us, follow those notes to a T. Remember that we’ll know more about what’s happening in the arena than you will.”

“ _ Please _ remember that,” Amity repeated, patting a hand on Cable’s arm, the other hand holding onto the lever that kept her chair moving forward. 

Pixel turned her head back to see that not only was Wiress more distressed than she’d been throughout the last few days, but Beetee had draped his own jacket over her shoulders. She was whispering something to him nervously, and he spoke back to her in a volume that was too quiet for Pixel to hear, but his demeanor was, as always, calm and abating. 

They neared the hovercraft and Pixel gulped down the bile that had started to jump into her throat. 

“Well, this part sucks,” Sinclair announced boldly, folding his muscular arms over each other. “If I didn’t have to watch over you guys I’d be drowning my anxieties in liquor within the next hour, but… I have faith.”

His brows furrowed a minute as he stared at the hovercraft with concern. It had been twenty years since his own Games, and Pixel got the feeling that there were demons left over from them that had never quite left the man. It was a feeling she got with every Victor from Three; there was something that seemed to haunt each one of them that came across only vaguely in their mannerisms, except Wiress, who showed her scars quite markedly. 

The group stopped in front of the hovercraft, and Pixel took a step towards her closest mentor.

“Thank you,” she told Sinclair softly. He leaned over and gave her a hug, then patted Cable solidly on the shoulder. 

Wiress and Amity gave hugs as well, and Beetee simply nodded and told them, “Good bye and good luck.” Pixel wished he might have given some kind of reassuring smile, but Beetee was practical. If it would have helped to get their hopes up, that’s what he would have done. But he knew the slim chances more than anyone here, so Pixel let it slide off her back as she entered the hovercraft.

The workers on board injected Pixel and Cable with their trackers as soon as the duo stepped onto the hovercraft, with only a few tributes already in place. They took their seats next to each other wordlessly, and within ten minutes all twenty-four had been injected and seated.

The hovercraft ride was not long, though Pixel felt completely disoriented in the windowless vehicle. The inertia of the thing made it feel like they were going in circles for five minutes before they actually went anywhere, as if any of them would be able to plot out any kind of location. And twenty minutes after that, they were landing in an underground hangar. 

Timon picked up Pixel from the hovercraft and led her into the chamber where her cylinder waited for her. The two had another twenty minutes to prepare, and he spent that time telling her about the clothing he was putting on her while he braided her hair back into a low, practical bun. 

“These leggings are soft, but it’ll take a bear attack to rip through them,” he explained as he handed the gray fabric to his tribute. “It’s a newer technology- much more comfortable than denim, but just as strong. The tank top is similar-”

He pulled out a white racerback tank, along with the same kind of gym shoes they’d worn back in private training and an olive green windbreaker. 

“Hard to tell what kind of elements you’ll be facing,” he explained as he helped lace up the shoes. Pixel didn’t respond the whole time; the nausea still hadn’t subsided and the last thing she wanted to do was get sick on someone who had only been nice to her. She simply nodded the whole time, until Timon reached into his pocket.

“And Sinclair told me this was your token,” he held up a small silver key.

Pixel blinked a couple of seconds in confusion. She hadn’t brought a token from home; her family had never bothered with them. And then it clicked back into place: the Peacekeeper’s key that she’d stolen off of him during her Reaping. She thought she’d left it in her pocket back when she changed clothes on the train, forgotten along with her old hand-me-down dress, but it must have been salvaged by Sinclair or an Avox servant. She smiled, and finally allowed herself to open her mouth.

“Thank you,” she said, only a millisecond before a soft female voice erupted out of the speakers above them, giving Pixel a minute to get into her tube to be lifted up into the arena. 

“Good luck, darling,” Timon’s right hand with deep black nails patted her on the head, and with his left he slipped the key into a pocket on her leggings. “You’ll be fabulous.”

Pixel took a deep breath in. The counter was reaching thirty seconds when she stepped onto the tube, and she let her eyes close for that last bit of time, allowed her breath to slow as she pulled air deeply into her lungs during her last moments of safety. And then the tube jolted upwards.

She opened her eyes as she ascended into the space, and the first thing she could see before her was a massive, spindly, dead tree. It stood so high that Pixel could not make out the top from where she stood; it simply twisted higher and higher, its gray wood standing eerie and monstrous above the group of teenagers. If the sun had been directly overhead, she would have gotten no relief from the tangle of gnarled branches, devoid of leaves or greenery. 

But the sun was not overhead; it couldn’t be seen past the large red canyon walls that surrounded the tree and the tributes ringed around the Cornucopia. The walls stood several stories high: natural cliffs that reached higher than any rock formation Pixel had ever dreamed of seeing. She’d seen mountains in past Games, and cliffs that dropped off and provided for dramatic endings to battles of Hunger Games past, but she’d never imagined the height of the sheer face of multiple crags within the massive gorge. The tributes stood at the bottom, with the Cornucopia glittering before them, and Pixel was struck with mild panic at the realization that though there seemed to be plateaus within the rock face- caves and reliefs that would provide spots for shelter- she hadn’t learned to rock climb well enough to get up the twenty or thirty feet required to reach them. Nobody would be able to get that high without special gear. This would be a short Games, she figured, if all twenty-four of them were stuck at the bottom of the ravine. 

And the Cornucopia itself was a mess of weapons and food and items. A bag of apples sat about ten feet in front of Pixel, a green backpack another ten feet beyond that. The center was a terrifying mix of swords and crossbows and knives and all kinds of things that could, and would, be used to hurt someone like her. 

The countdown had started, and Pixel looked deliriously around to who might be close to her, who might be able to hurt her soonest. The girl from Five was immediately to her left, squinting through her large glasses. A boy she recognized as a tribute from Twelve stood directly to her right. Cable was maybe seven or eight spots down to her left, and stood next to Georgia, whose dark hair was pulled into a high ponytail and who looked more serious than Pixel had ever seen her. Pixel could not see Urban and assumed he was directly across the Cornucopia from her, but she could easily catch sight of little Miriam Opal down to her right, bouncing on her toes as if preparing for a school track meet.

But Pixel couldn’t pay attention to the other tributes. Not right now. She was determined to listen to her mentors’ advice, and part of her felt like perhaps there was the possibility of scavenging later on. If the Careers didn’t make camp at the Cornucopia, or if they went out to hunt, what would be there to stop her from taking the remainders of the haul here?

She nodded to herself, a plan in place and a direction- backwards and to the right, where the nearest cliff face stood- in mind. 

_ Ten, nine, eight _

Pixel breathed deep, letting all thoughts escape her brain. No Gamemakers were coming after her family. No Careers were targeting her. Nobody was threatening the well-beings of her or the people she cared about. Pixel Delaroux was simply existing, and she needed to  _ continue _ existing. 

_ Three, two, one. _

The buzzer sounded, and Pixel turned in place and darted away from the Cornucopia as quickly as her feet would take her. Of course she wanted something from the stash, of course she was tempted to take the bag of apples in front of her. But if she took the apples, she was going to want that green backpack. And if she took the green backpack, she’d be led further and further into the center of the Cornucopia, where no doubt there would be someone much bigger than her already wielding a sword. No, towards the cliff face she went. 

Her brain was thinking she’d follow the wall down as far as she could until she found some kind of cave or inlet to take shelter near the site, but the arena was starting to make more sense as she neared the rock. Built into the natural formation, impossible to see further than fifteen feet away, was a ladder. It was dug into the rocks, so that a tribute might be able to climb up onto the plateaus further up the gorge. 

Pixel took this opportunity and grabbed onto the first ladder hold she could see, scrambling up about twenty feet before hitting horizontal land again. She didn’t feel tired or winded as usual; there was only the rush of adrenaline, the mild feeling of victory as she dove into a bush that sat at the precipice of the cliff. Twigs poked into her skin, scratched against her face and tangled into her hair, but she was small, and could fit rather easily into the greenery so that nobody would be able to see her. 

She dug herself forward, and quite conveniently was now able to see what was happening at the Cornucopia. Some shapes she could recognize- the large, muscled figure of Petra, for instance- and many she could not. There were kids darting away from the Cornucopia, backpacks and items in tow. Several figures stood in the center, whom Pixel could make out as the Career pack, each brandishing their own weapon. 

Pixel sat frozen as she watched, unable to make a sound as horror filled her veins. A boy she didn’t recognize, with dirty blond hair, was running away with a sleeve of throwing knives and a large backpack. The twins from One, in perfect unison, were on either side of him, yelling something unintelligible but excited. Before the boy could react, Praxis had leaped from where he was running and pinned the boy down onto the ground. The boy kicked up, wrestling and punching furiously, and managed to get the large boy off of him, but as soon as he gained his footing, he was met with a knife directly into his neck. Little Miriam had pulled one of the throwing knives out of the sleeve and jammed it into his neck while he was distracted. 

There was more happening, too, and not just with the Careers. Pixel could make out the form of Isadora wrestling with a girl over a large hunting knife, Georgia running past them but looking carefully at her ally to make sure she would be ok. Isadora ducked down and swept her leg across, throwing the other girl to the floor, slashed downwards onto her neck with her new large knife, and made a run for it with Georgia while her adversary choked on blood.

Pixel’s eyes darted across again. The girl from Four- Helene- had lined up her bow and arrow perfectly, and was now sending a shot flying directly into the skull of the boy from Nine. The boy fell before he could even get past the tribute platforms on his way out. 

Most horrifyingly, Pixel recognized a boy who had fallen backwards onto the ground, with another boy towering over him holding a terrifyingly large sword. His black hair was swept backwards, his ashy skin almost so gray it bled into the towering tree behind him. He said something in desperation, and Pixel could almost hear her district partner’s pleas of mercy. 

And then she let her eyes rest on the boy standing over him. No longer charming audiences and smiling for cameras, Urban Fonseca was lithe and deadly and holding a lethal weapon over a boy who wasn’t half as fast and strong as he was. 

_ No _ , Pixel didn’t want to believe this could happen. She trusted Urban. And though she knew what he was capable of, though her brain had told her time and time again that he was nothing more than a machine trained to kill children, she still wanted to believe he was better than that. He had been nice to the smallest kid in the Games, there was no way he would-

But her thoughts were dashed, and her stomach turned inside out, as he lifted his sword, and brought it down onto Cable. With one fell swoop, Cable Cho’s head came off of his body, and Pixel felt herself go completely limp, nearly fainting at the sight.


	15. Chapter 15

Pixel remained in the bush for over an hour, well past the time that the Careers had taken off and the hovercrafts had come by to pick up the bodies. Eight tributes had died in the bloodbath at the Cornucopia, signaled by cannon fire when the dust had cleared. The only ones she recognized at the end of it were Cable, the boy from Five, and the girl from Seven; the remainders would be broadcast later that night.

When she finally emerged, Pixel took a long, hard look at her surroundings. The canyon that enveloped the central part of the arena was excessively tall, with scraggly brush climbing up the walls. Along each wall there sat what seemed to be terraces and rocky platforms, and Pixel could now see ladders etched into the rock throughout the entire gorge if she looked closely. They were all just like the ladder she’d climbed to reach the spot where she was now. 

On either end of the base of the canyon, the flat ground seemed to stretch further on, though it was hard to see where either end went as they turned corners and had their views obscured by the red dust that coated the terrain. Pixel had seen the Careers head in one of those directions- the one furthest from her, luckily, beyond the monstrous tree. 

The dead tree in the center loomed over everything except the very top levels of the canyon. While the rock walls did have greenery and bushes and living trees, this one seemed to stretch and twist ever upwards with no life in its gray branches. Though as Pixel squinted closer at it, she could make out the tiny figures of three vultures perched on its limbs. Too bad for them, she thought, that the hovercrafts had already taken the bodies of the deceased tributes away.

Pixel listened carefully, looked around, then dared to exit the bush and get near the Cornucopia again. She stepped down the rock ladder, and quietly,  _ quietly _ sneaked in near the area. There was still blood that darkened the red dirt below her feet, and she couldn’t bring herself to go near the spot where Urban had decapitated Cable. 

Part of her felt like she was one of those vultures that now stared down at her, picking through the leftovers of dead tributes. There was a small knife embedded into the ground that someone had dropped or thrown, a bag of beef jerky, an abandoned fanny pack next to one of the tribute platforms with twine, flint, and an empty canteen inside.

She stuffed as much as she could into the fanny pack, and managed to fit the bag of jerky into the pocket of her windbreaker. The temperature, luckily, was comfortable at the moment, and the sun was now starting to peep out from the ridges of the canyon. It had to be late morning, she figured, considering they’d left the Capitol so early and it hadn’t taken long to arrive. She imagined they were probably within the same mountain range as the Capitol itself, or at least nearby.

Pixel pulled out a strip of beef jerky and ripped a bite off with her teeth, chewing slowly as she walked, her eyes carefully scanning the area for movement. Here in the center of the canyon was a spot that was far too exposed for her comfort, and she moved towards the canyon walls to hug the sides of it and stay away from eyesight. 

Still, having the low ground was paranoia-inducing, and as soon as Pixel hit another ladder embedded into the rock, she climbed up.

This particular ledge that she pulled herself onto had a couple of choices for her to continue; in front of her was another ladder to climb onto another level of the canyon (there had to be five or six levels total before she could reach the very top). Not ten feet away from the ladder, though, was a cave dug deep into the rock. Pixel peered her head in carefully, but the eerie darkness and silence inside the hollow opening made her uneasy, and she opted for the ladder up to another level. 

The ground on this level of the canyon was wider, and seemed to stretch another thirty or forty feet forward before leading to another ladder. Scraggly brush covered the ground, some of it reaching as high as Pixel’s shoulder, and as she walked through she felt the plants sticking into the fabric of her clothes. If she hadn’t been wearing the windbreaker, she figured, it would probably be scratching into her skin as well. 

Every couple of steps she stopped and listened for movement, knowing that there very well might be someone here waiting to pounce. But she heard nothing, and reached the other side of the level unharmed. 

It was here she saw another cave, similar to the one below her that she had already passed up. Curious, but still suspicious, Pixel decided on the ladder once again to climb up to the fourth level.

There were trees up here. Tall- though not nearly as tall as the dead one in the center of the arena- these stretched up high, with soft red bark that Pixel could easily dig her nails into if she tried. There were few branches within reach of the small girl, but she did manage to find one tree that was manageable for her. 

She decided that climbing a tree for a better look around was much safer and more secure than the ladder that most likely was waiting for her on the other side of this level, and lifted herself up into the branches. 

It wasn’t an easy climb by any stretch of the imagination. The branches were few and far between, and Pixel had to risk a few jumps to grab onto a couple of them. But after about twenty minutes, she’d made it a solid twenty feet into the tree, and it was here she decided to remain for the rest of the day. 

The time in the tree wasn’t exactly exciting. In fact, Pixel found herself getting incredibly bored after the first hour of sitting there, and considered stepping down just to stretch out her joints. But she thought back to the several hours in the concrete room in the Tribute Tower, waiting for Caius the Gamemaker to come and threaten her family. And if she could handle that, she could stay in a tree for a while longer. 

So the afternoon stretched on. The sun above her was, luckily, mottled through the tree leaves, but she could still feel the heat of the late day’s sun on her face. If she hadn’t found the shelter she figured she’d have been sweating through her windbreaker at this point. Pixel did, after a while, take it off to offer some comfort on the branch where she’d perched. Hour after hour, she sat and waited and watched. Nothing happened. The sun started to move past the ridge opposite from where it had risen, and the shadows of the day grew long. 

Pixel started to doze off. The branch wasn’t all that uncomfortable, after all. The bark and her windbreaker were soft. She could allow her eyes to rest, she figured. And slowly, slowly her eyelids began to droop.

Until the yells came. 

Pixel’s eyes shot open, and she covered her own mouth with her hand to keep any gasps of surprise from coming out. But she didn’t see anyone, just heard the voices. 

_ “Go around- give me the knife!” _

_ “Help me up!” _

_ “Get him!” _

Pixel’s chest fell in the smallest amount of relief as she scooted forward to see what was happening. They’d said “him”. They hadn’t seen her. 

She peered through the branches of the tree to catch Miriam and Praxis darting off and through the trees. Past them, the pair from Four were just standing up after climbing out of somewhere unseen, and the girl reached down and grabbed the hand of someone. 

Squinting a bit, Pixel made out the corner of another cave. They must have been on every level, she figured, and the Careers must have been scouting out this particular cave while Pixel was here in the tree. She felt a small bit of relief that she hadn’t let herself down to explore. Petra was now climbing out, assisted by her ally, and Pixel could only assume that Urban was bringing up the rear.

“I’ve got him!” Pixel recognized the voice of Praxis coming from a spot she was unable to see. “Gotta admit, you gave us a run for our money, but it’s over. Nice try.”

A yell from a teenager came through, followed by a distinct choking sound. Pixel winced, but remained still. 

“Did you do it?” Miriam’s voice asked. “Where’s the-”

A cannon sounded, interrupting her sentence. Pixel could only sit and hold her breath.

“Nice,” she said, followed by a clapping sound that Pixel deduced was probably a high-five. “It’s getting late.”

A pause occurred, followed by the sounds of people digging through greenery and brush. 

“Where do you want to make camp?” she yelled back at her allies, who were catching up to her. They all remained a good distance away, and though Pixel didn’t move she felt assured that they couldn’t see her even if she did. The group of six appeared beyond several trees, and Pixel could see each of them to some degree now. Praxis was sporting a bruise under his eye that was already developing, and seemed to be wiping blood off the knife onto his pants.

“We can take the caves down to the bottom level,” Urban answered, his voice more cold and calculated than Pixel had ever heard it. “Nobody will be coming after us, and I don’t think there’s a chance that they’ll send mutts or anything this early in the Games.”

“Oooh good idea!” Helene, the girl from Four, replied, her voice giddy and excited. “We can send out a couple people at a time to hunt, too.”

“If that’s what you want to do,” Urban answered. “If I’m right about the cave system, we can take it pretty much anywhere in the arena. I want to rest up so we can explore tomorrow.”

_ Cave system. _ Pixel wanted to figure out what exactly he meant by that, but focused more on the conversation in front of her. Her stomach was beginning to rumble in the early stages of her developing appetite (she’d help herself to another bite of beef jerky soon), and she was starting to feel thirsty. The discomfort made her want to leave the branch more than anything, but she simply sat still, her left leg beginning to go numb from the position.

“Let’s stay on the lowest level,” Petra’s voice- deep and surprisingly calm- came through clear as day. Pixel didn’t think she’d heard her speak beyond the required interview, and tilted her head to get a better listen. “I don’t feel comfortable up high.”

“Cool, I think that’s the plan, then,” Urban answered. Pixel squinted her eyes to see the boy better. He now had the same massive sword he’d used to kill Cable strapped to his side, fastened in some kind of sheath. He’d also gotten a forest green backpack that was now attached to his back and seemed to be stuffed to the brim with food and supplies.

“Are you keeping that knife?” Helene turned her head towards Praxis. Her brows furrowed suspiciously. “I told you I wanted it back.”

“Oh,” Praxis flipped it around in his fingers for a bit, keeping her watching in silence. Then he turned it, hilt-first, to Helene. “Sure.”

“Good,” she grabbed it without a second thought and strapped it to her side. “Let’s go.”

Miriam looked at the two of them, one eyebrow raised, then simply nodded her head and followed along. 

The Careers all double-checked their packs, then took one long look around. Pixel held her breath just in case, but their gazes seemed to pass over her, and she waited. Eventually they left, entering the cave from which they’d emerged, and Pixel dared to move once again in order to spare her poor, numb leg. 

When she got down on the ground, she made it no more than twenty feet before she had to stop herself from screaming. 

Of course she’d known that they’d killed someone below her, but she wasn’t expecting to actually come face-to-face with the dead boy from Eleven. Pixel swallowed her scream, and stepped around him, ducking through more trees and running to the face of the cliff going upwards. 

Part of her wanted to vomit. Sure, she’d watched the bloodbath happen from a distance. But there was nothing to compare to seeing the dead eyes of a boy who’d been alive only minutes earlier, completely up close and personal. She held herself together, only barely, knowing that she needed to hold onto as much food and water as possible for the sake of her body. She tried closing her eyes, shaking her head to erase the image of his blank eyes staring towards the sun and the blood still pooling out of his chest. 

But nothing seemed to work, and she could do nothing but sit and hold her hands to her face until she heard a small  _ thud _ next to her.

Pixel jumped, startled at the sound and prepared to run for her life, but was relieved to see a parachute with a decent-sized package arriving next to her. She let out a deep breath and reached for it. Her first sponsor gift. On top of the package was a small note, tied with a cord that Pixel used her pocket knife to cut off. 

_ Keep the high ground, and stay away from other tributes. Stay safe. -S _

Pixel tucked the note away in her pocket, thanking Sinclair quietly as she dug into the package. 

A full twenty-ounce water bottle sat in the bottom along with a flashlight, which Pixel pocketed into her windbreaker, and on top of them a large bag of granola. 

Her mentors didn’t want her to fight. Not yet, she figured, with only survival items arriving in her pack. So she wouldn’t. Pixel Delaroux had never been a fighter, after all. She’d been a sneak, a thief, and a pickpocket. And while she had never been quite so alone before, now was the time to turn her skills into survival. Perhaps she would never physically overpower anyone, but she would outlast every single one of the people coming to kill her.


	16. Chapter 16

Cable, the boy from Five, both from Six, the girl from Seven, both from Nine, the boy from Eleven, and the girl from Twelve. 

Nine faces lit up the night sky as Pixel watched from the top of the arena. She’d climbed the last couple levels and found shelter in a rocky outcropping far from the identical cave that sat at this top ledge. Beyond her were more rocks and huge boulders, and then what seemed to be a long stretch of desert, with nothing but sand and dust and dirt. The Gamemakers clearly didn’t want them going much further past here, and when Pixel looked across the canyon, past the gray tree to the other side, there seemed to simply be an identical level of sand and rock. 

It was there Pixel had earlier caught sight of two people climbing together- a girl and a boy. He helped her up onto the highest level, and the two of them sat and shared what looked like a small meal together. Eventually the sun hit the two of them in the right position, and glinted off the girl’s large glasses in a manner that gave away her identity; she was the storm girl from Five, quirky and cute. From the look of it she wasn't much older than Pixel, definitely no more than fifteen or sixteen. The boy had to be her ally, but Pixel didn’t recognize him from the other faces among the tributes. Her district partner was gone, so he had to be from somewhere she hadn't paid much mind to. 

Pixel sat and watched them for a while, feeling a small pang of loneliness when she remembered how she wouldn’t be seeing anyone any time soon unless they were coming to kill her, then settled into the rocks for the night. 

She’d done the best she could to set a trap, pulling out her ball of twine and stretching it in a perimeter far outside her rock outcropping, then balancing a small rock on top of it. If anyone disturbed the twine, it would cause the rock to fall onto Pixel, alerting her that someone was there and giving her a small head start if she needed to run. 

It was here that she settled into an uneasy sleep, waking every couple of hours under the clear night sky. The temperature was comfortable, and she used her windbreaker as a makeshift blanket, with her bag of granola as a pillow. But she often found herself getting distracted by the millions of stars lighting up the sky above her. 

There weren’t many stars to be seen in District Three. Her father had said that there was too much going on within the city, and had used the term “light pollution” to describe it. He had tried to show her a very old book with constellations as a child, and pointed out the ancient names that old civilizations gave to the star formations. Orion, Cassiopeia, Libra… Pixel could still hear her father telling her the names, even if she never learned to discern one cluster of stars from the next. 

He’d once told her that there were old stories and wives tales about the stars that you were born under. That because Pixel was born in late July (her fifteenth birthday would be coming soon, she realized), her particular star sign was called “Leo”. Vista’s had been called “Virgo” and his own was “Pisces”. 

She’d never been interested before. There were no stars for her to read back there. How was she even to know that the stars themselves still existed, that they hadn’t been wiped out along with all those old civilizations? Her father had called her silly for this notion, but Pixel had just laughed at him and his old superstitions. 

The wide open sky here was now proof of what Pixel had doubted: there were still hundreds of thousands, maybe millions of stars in the universe sitting up there to look at. They weren’t visible in District Three or the Capitol because of the bright city lights, but here in the dark they became more brilliant than she’d ever imagined. 

Maybe if the stars were still there, then her father’s old tales weren’t so far-fetched. If only she could remember them. There had been one about a giant maze, she recalled, and another about a creature that could turn people to stone. But they weren’t coming back, not tonight, to Pixel’s dismay.

She woke disoriented and groggy, with the sun high in the sky as if it was nearly midday. It was hotter than yesterday, and her skin was pink and warm to the touch where it had been exposed. Pixel needed to find shelter from the sun, and that wouldn’t happen all the way up here on the highest level of the canyon. She gathered her belongings, winding up the ball of twine and stuffing it back into the fanny pack, then dared to take a few bites of beef jerky and granola to sate her growling stomach. 

Pixel opened the twist top of her full water bottle, took a few gulps, and put it back in her pocket. This amount would be okay for a few days max, she realized. By day four, she would need to know where to access a reliable source of water. She could theoretically survive on the food she had for two to three weeks, even if it would be miserable; she’d seen people in dire circumstances on the streets of District Three surviving on much, much less.

When Pixel finally stood up from her spot, the vertigo hit her like a truck.

It got hot in District Three during the summer, but nothing like this. Back home, there was the lake to cool things down, provide a refreshing summer breeze over the city. Here, the air was dry as a bone. The sun and heat sucked all the moisture from her body and created a lightheadedness that she had to grab onto a rock to manage. The nerves in her skin were starting to prickle, yelling at her to find some shade. 

But she couldn’t chance going down the ladder, not when she could hardly handle her bearings. Which meant she would need to hope that there was nothing terrifying in the cave that sat on this level of the canyon. 

Pixel pulled out her flashlight from the pocket of the windbreaker and sat cross-legged at the entrance to the cave, just within the cover of shade, then listened carefully. It was silent, except for a faint  _ drip _ .  _ Drip. Drip. _ It fell rhythmically, somewhere along the path that sloped downward into the darkness. She flicked the flashlight on and shone it into the cavern. Maybe that dripping indicated water.

But she saw nothing but the rocky walls surrounding a path that angled downwards- gently at first, then it became more steep until it reached a point where Pixel was unable to see any further. She pulled out her bottle of water and took two long, needful gulps, wanting for more but not trusting that there actually was water where the noise was.

Pixel pocketed the water bottle- now only about two-thirds of the way filled. If she could find a water source, she could drink the rest and fill up the bottle, but for now she’d need to conserve. 

She stood again at the entrance to the cave and chanced a step inward. The temperature immediately dropped about ten degrees, to her great relief, and she stepped again. The cavern was only about five feet tall, and any other tribute would have had to crouch to fit comfortably, but Pixel stood at only four-foot-eight (having yet to reach her teenage growth spurt), and walked easily within its confines. 

The pathway steepened, and she eventually needed to hold onto the side of the cave for support. Would there be a ladder in here, she wondered? Would she need to look for-

“Oh!” she called out softly as a rock beneath her right foot gave out. She held tight to the flashlight in her right hand, but her left hand lost its grip on the cave wall and she fell. The floor was getting much steeper at this point- so steep that she was now tumbling further and further down, the darkness only lit by the frantic light emanating from her device. 

Pixel tried to keep silent as she fell, tumbling down the path that had to be at least forty-five degrees at this point. And it was still worsening. Her cheek hit the side of the cavern, and she felt a scrape and tasted blood as she bit her tongue. Soon, she was falling completely vertically, doing her best not to scream as she plummeted down, down…

And hit soft ground. Pixel lifted her head up and quietly moaned as she pointed the flashlight up to see a hole in the ceiling that had deposited her… here. It was only about ten feet up, but when she tried to move, she had to bite back a yell of pain. She’d landed on her left ankle. Had she broken it? Dislocated? Sprained? Even a twist would put her out of commission for a while. She remembered a trick they’d taught her back in the factories, when they’d given the talk about how hurt was too hurt to return to work. If you could flick the area and not scream in agony, it wasn’t a break.

So Pixel chanced a flick. And while there was a dull pain, it wasn’t enough to make her jump out of her skin. That was good, she thought as she sat in place. 

She moved her flashlight around to see her surroundings, and saw that she’d fallen into a larger cavern of sorts. The ground she’d fallen on was soft and loamy, almost… almost  _ damp _ . Pixel looked up and glanced around, but there didn’t seem to be a source of water- no underground river or lake, though the dripping noise was much louder. It took several minutes before she realized it was coming from the ceiling. Coming down from a stalactite that clung to the roof of the cavern, water was slowly dripping down onto the floor about ten feet away. And then Pixel shone her flashlight onto the walls. 

There it was, a very soft, very slow, but very steady stream of water that was making its way down the walls of the cavern. There had to be a nearby lake or river somewhere in this arena, but for now, Pixel figured, she could capture some of this water for herself. 

Gritting her teeth, Pixel managed to stand up after several arduous minutes of maneuvering around her foot, then limped over to the dripping from the ceiling. She held her hands out, cupping them to catch the water, and took several desperate laps from them when she felt enough had pooled. 

It was cool and refreshing, though somewhat metallic, but it was the best thing Pixel had tasted in ages. The reminder that she’d learned in training- to boil your water and make sure it was clean before drinking it- reappeared in her head after several minutes of this, but her body wanted it so desperately she couldn’t help but ignore those thoughts. Besides, she had no campfire, no iodine to sanitize the water. And how dirty could it be if it wasn’t out in the open, exposed to the elements? 

Pixel figured she just had to hope this was safe to drink.

While the thought was running through her head, a cannon fired, echoing through each entrance to the cavern. She jumped, tensing a bit, then relaxed. She hadn’t heard any ruckus, no sound of a fight. This death hadn’t happened near her. She didn’t need to know, so she let herself put it at the back of her mind. 

Fourteen tributes remained, Pixel reminded herself as she swallowed down some more water, this time from her clean water bottle. When she’d emptied it about halfway she held it under the stalactite to let it refill, and slowly it  _ drip drip dripped _ into her supply. It was almost maddening, watching it fill at such a slow pace, and it was only about three-quarters full when Pixel heard arguing, and a shuffling down a pathway she hadn’t noticed when she’d fallen into this cavern. 

Suddenly frantic, Pixel capped the bottle and shoved it into her windbreaker, then shuffled as fast as she could into a corner that was masked by over a dozen stalagmites rising up from the ground. She was small enough, and the room was dark enough, that she felt comfortable hiding there until she could find a safe exit. Heart pounding in her ears, she flicked off her flashlight and leaned back against the wall, into the dark crevice so that nobody, perhaps not even the Capitol cameras, would catch sight of her.

“ _ I said, give me my knife back _ ,” Pixel heard a familiar voice and a chuckle as movement appeared close to her. She held her breath, hoping against all hopes that they wouldn’t be able to see her, a sitting duck in the corner of the cavern. 

But the light was dim, barely peeking in from outside, and Pixel was camouflaged. She peeked between the stalagmites, but could only see vague figures appearing from behind them. Still, she knew the voices well enough.

“What? I gave it back last time, didn’t I? What’s the big-”

“You didn’t even need it this time! The guy fell off the ledge, you didn’t have to 'finish' _anything_. Just because _you_ couldn’t find a blade doesn’t mean _I_ have to let you stab me in the back.”

A new voice, coming from a small figure that Pixel didn’t hear enter the room, sounded out frantically. 

“Praxis! Just give it back to Helene. You’re fine,” Miriam’s voice was filled with more nerves than Pixel had ever heard it. And part of Pixel was hopeful. Perhaps it was just the three of them. Maybe the Careers had split up. Petra and Urban and Martel from Four, none of them seemed to be here. It would be easier to sneak away from a group of three. Much easier than it would have been with six. 

“You better listen to your sister, asshole,” Helene spoke, a tinge of madness seeping into her words. 

“Hey,  _ hey! _ ” Pixel’s heart fell when she heard Urban’s voice appear, out-of-breath and worried. More footsteps followed behind, that Pixel could only assume belonged to the rest of the Careers. “Calm down, guys. It’s day two. Too early to be fighting like this.”

“If he’d just give me my knife back,” Helene’s voice sounded through gritted teeth, and Pixel could see her shadowed figure pointing aggressively towards Praxis.

“Ok, ok!” Praxis held his hands up, twirled the knife in his fingers a bit, then handed it, hilt-first, to Helene. Pixel saw the shapes moving, both of them tentative towards each other, but Praxis more casual than Helene. Miriam stood to the side, and though Pixel couldn’t see much, she could tell that she stood stiff and nervous. “Listen, we’ve got to calm down and slow down. I’m pretty sure we’ve covered the entire god damned arena today. We’re moving so fast, it would be smarter to let the other tributes come to us.”

“We’re too big for that,” Urban answered, his form now somewhat visible in the shadows. “They’ll know where we are from two hundred feet away.”

“Maybe we should cut down, then,” Helene answered. There was no response, but there hung a tension in the air. She tightened her grip on the knife. “Split up for a little bit. Meet back at camp. I need to get away from this asshole before I do anything I regret, anyway.”

“Oh, I’m sure you  _ love _ me,” Praxis teased, taking a step closer to the girl. “Get over yourself Helene.”

“No!” she took another step closer to him in response. “Fuck you. I know what you and your sister are going to do to all of us, anyway. Tag team until we’re all dead and you guys can fight each other for the crown.”

“And how long did it take you to come up with that idea?” Praxis teased her, getting close to her face. “Maybe you’re right, maybe we’ll-”

“ _ Praxis, stop! _ ” Miriam screamed at her brother. But not before Helene lunged forward.

Before anyone could respond, Helene had raised the knife and driven it deep into Praxis Opal’s throat. He lay on the ground, choking on his own blood. She pulled the knife out, mildly stunned at what she'd done, and sat looking up at the rest of her team. 


	17. Chapter 17

Pixel had to choke back the scream of surprise. She hadn’t expected Helene to actually attack Praxis in all this. Not yet. She’d foreseen arguments, maybe some frustration, and eventually- in several days- it would come to a head. But not like this. Not so soon. 

“Praxis,” Miriam whispered, hardly able to get the words out. Her head- still obscured by the shadows and the stalagmites- turned towards Helene. “What the  _ fuck? _ ”

“He was asking for it!” Helene stood and took a step away from Praxis’s twitching body. He was still pulling in choked breaths but it wouldn’t be long before they stopped. Pixel tried not to listen, tried not to picture the boy who sounded like he was drowning in his own blood, but it became near impossible. 

_ Please, just die already _ , she hoped to herself.  _ Don’t make me listen to this. _

“He wasn’t asking for _ shit! _ ” Miriam screeched. “You killed him!  _ You killed my brother, you bitch! _ ”

She stepped forward towards Helene, and Pixel expected to see her attack the girl, but instead she shoved her out of the way and crouched down into the shadows. Though Pixel couldn’t see the siblings, she could hear Miriam’s soft sobs, her whispers of comfort to her brother. 

It was another minute before his cannon fired. None of the other Careers had said a word, instead choosing to stand in awkward silence. Miriam slowly stood back up and turned to face Helene, her small frame standing a full six inches shorter than the other girl yet somehow towering in anger. Pixel was unable to see her eyes, but could picture the fire glowering through them, the fury that must have been emanating from the girl’s face.

The other three Careers continued to stand silent, no less than ten feet away from the two girls. Pixel could see the form of Urban’s hand holding onto Martel’s shoulder, holding him back.

“What  _ exactly _ did you think was going to come of that?” Miriam’s voice was shockingly quiet now, though her stance was still stiff and aggressive, like that of a small angry dog ready to go for the throat. “I want a good reason or so help me-”

“He was going to take me out sooner than later and you  _ know _ it!” Helene held the hand with her knife up. “I had reason to be paranoid, don’t pretend like I didn’t. He’s had his eyes out for me since the day we arrived in the Capitol.”

“You dumb bitch, of  _ course _ he did!” Miriam’s voice was starting to get louder again and she took a step towards Helene, who responded by stepping back defensively. “Or did you not know that only one of us is exiting this game alive? He had his eyes out for everyone! What kind of dumbass kills her ally on day two of the Games, especially when her ally’s  _ sister _ is standing there watching? We still had like seven or eight people to take out before it was supposed to come to this!”

“ _ Fuck you _ ,” Helene spat at her feet. “And fuck your brother, too. I hope you guys are happy together when all of this is over.”

That seemed to be the last straw. 

Miriam pounced, quicker than Pixel had seen anybody move in her life. Helene tried to hold her back, swung her knife wildly and slashed at the smaller girl, but the girl from One was slippery. She sent a palm flying up into Helene’s nose, and a loud crack indicated that she had broken it with ease. Helene screamed in pain and Miriam ignored it, taking her wrist and twisting it painfully in a direction that sent Helene to the ground, the knife that had killed Praxis now tumbling out of her hand. 

Miriam picked it up and drew- from a pocket or a sheath, Pixel couldn’t see- a second knife, this one thinner and longer than the other one. Helene tried to get back on her feet but Miriam jammed the second knife down into her hand, pinning her to the floor. Helene screamed in pain. 

Pixel looked up, tearing her eyes away from the horror before her to see the other Careers. Martel seemed itching to move, to join in the fight, but Urban had a hand still holding his shoulder, as if he was wisely keeping him back from joining a fight he would not win. Petra stood to the side, and Pixel could see nothing but her strong, muscular frame leaning against the cave wall casually, watching and waiting.

Pixel looked back to see Helene writhing, pulling the knife out from her hand and screaming in pain as she did so. But she didn’t have time. Miriam had flipped over behind her head now, and as Helene managed to gain a grip on the knife that had pinned her to the ground, the smaller girl grabbed her head with her left hand, and held the thick, deadly knife to her neck with her right. 

“ _ Fuck you! _ ” Helene was screaming now, trying to pull out of the grasp that Miriam had on her head. She couldn’t move much, though, as the knife was getting jammed further and further into the skin of her neck. If she moved too much, it would easily slip through her windpipe. “You’re not getting out of this anyway! Not with all of them still here! Help me, you fucking cowards!”

She pointed towards the other Careers. Martel didn’t seem inclined to jump in anymore, and Pixel could feel the betrayal that Helene seemed to be hinting at. They were allies, but that didn’t mean that they were prepared to take bullets for each other. And none of them were willing to face the rabid Miriam right now.

Helene struggled some more, sent more insults flying towards Miriam, but it wasn’t to last long. Miriam wordlessly slid her knife across Helene’s throat and let the girl’s body fall to the floor. She stood silently, then stared for several seconds until the cannon went off. Then she screamed and lunged forward again, stabbing and slashing at the dead girl’s body, sending blood flying as she wailed and cried and yelled for her brother. 

Only now did the other three Careers intervene. 

“Hey! Hey, hey, hey,” Urban grabbed Miriam by the shoulders. “It’s over. She’s dead. Stop!”

Miriam was struggling to catch her breath through the sobs breaking through her chest. “ _You don’t get it!_ Praxis-”

She collapsed onto the ground, clutching her head in her hands next to her brother’s body. Petra walked up and sat next to her. She put a hand on her back and rubbed it for a few seconds, the most tender gesture that Pixel had ever seen come from the burly girl from Two. 

“We need to go,” she said softly. “His body will go back to your family in One. Let’s go get some water. I think that river we found is clean. We haven’t gotten sick from drinking it.”

Miriam pulled in several deep breaths, then nodded and turned to Petra. In a weak voice, she spoke up. “You-you’re right. And I’ll bet we’re not the only ones who’ve f-found it. If you listen there’s water in this cave th-that I’ll bet leads down to it.”

“We’ll go down and you can clean yourself off. Maybe there’s a straggler down there we can take out,” Petra stood back up, then picked up a backpack that sat off to the side Pixel hadn’t seen her wearing before. “Come on. I don’t trust the Gamemakers not to send a fire or mutts into here to drive us away so they can pick up the bodies.”

Miriam stood and gave a long look at her brother’s body, then picked up the pack he had been holding. Before she walked off with the other Careers, she gave a furious kick to Helene’s dead form lying not five feet away from Praxis’s, then she and the other three went off. 

Pixel waited, then let out a breath for the first time in what felt like an hour. Two members of the Career pack were gone before her very eyes. And she’d gotten information. The water was safe to drink- supposedly- and there was more of it in a river further down the canyon, though it was now being guarded by the four remaining Careers. 

She stood carefully- her ankle still throbbed in pain and she put as little weight on it as possible- and walked forward to the bodies, grimacing as she got a better view. Praxis was still bleeding profusely from his neck, but otherwise seemed fine. Helene, on the other hand, was bloody throughout her whole body. Her broken nose sat crooked on her face, which had been slashed from eyebrow to jaw, narrowly missing her eyes. Red seeped through her white tank top, and Pixel felt the need to hold her breath as she crouched down to search the bodies. 

Miriam had taken Praxis’s pack with her, but Pixel found a small matchbook on the inside of his jacket pocket, along with a pair of clean socks. The girl from One had also taken both knives she’d used to kill Helene, but otherwise hadn’t touched the items on the girl she’d killed. Pixel, while averting her eyes from the gore, quickly patted her down to find a coil of wire, along with a mostly empty backpack still being worn. She maneuvered the pack off of the dead girl, figuring it would be much more helpful than her tiny fanny pack, and opened it to find only a small tarp, wrapped and rolled tightly, sitting at the bottom. It would be enough for shelter; it was more than she’d had last night, and would hopefully fend off any more sunburn.

Pixel transferred all of her items into the larger backpack, including the beef jerky (which she took a couple of delectable bites from) and the water bottle, from the fanny pack and her jacket pocket. She left the fanny pack behind with the bodies, and stood up. 

The last thing she wanted to do was follow where the Careers had left- around a corner she hadn’t previously seen, which also seemed to be where the water in the cave was leading. But there was no way she’d be able to climb up to the hole from which she’d dropped. Pixel pulled out her flashlight and flicked it around a bit, towards the opposite side of the room, and decided she needed to poke around. 

Gritting her teeth together, she managed to get herself to a steady enough walk where her ankle still screamed in pain when she put all her weight on it, but it was manageable. Pixel could do this for minutes at a time and, hopefully, would regain her mobility with time. If she hid out for the next couple of days, found some kind of cloth to wrap it tightly with like she’d seen past tributes do (maybe the tarp would work?), she could eventually run on it again. She would need to, she figured, if she was going to survive. 

The cave went on further than she thought, and eventually, thankfully, she found a corner which she rounded towards some unknown destination. 

It was another corridor within the cave, and Pixel put a hand to the wall in case it began to slope downwards again like before, but this one seemed to hold, and she continued to walk- taking breaks every few minutes to rest her ankle- until finally there appeared light ahead.

Pixel emerged into the late afternoon sun, squinting as she took in the sight before her. It wasn’t anything she hadn’t seen before: she was now on the third or fourth level of the canyon, with dry brush surrounding her and tall, tall trees with red bark dotting the landscape. About forty feet beyond her there was a dropoff, where she could only assume the ledge to the canyon was waiting. And through the red bark and vegetation, she could see the massive, dead, gray monster of a tree standing in the distance, looming over the tributes like some great, old godlike creature rising and watching from the depths.

Adjusting her vision to more nearby territory, Pixel caught glimpses of movement in the brush and the trees, and tensed briefly, but relaxed again when she saw only birds and squirrels. Taking in a deep breath of fresh air, she let herself lean against the edge of the cave, slumping all her weight onto her good ankle. 

Knowing how dumb it was, out in the open air and exposed, Pixel allowed her eyes to close and relax, if only for a minute, and shook her head. She wanted, more than anything, to erase the images of Praxis and Helene, the boy from Eleven, the dead bodies that she had had no choice but to come across. Sure, she’d seen it happen on television her entire life, but there was something different about being here in person. It was all sticking to her: the dead eyes staring upwards, unblinking and unwavering, the blood seeping everywhere into clothes and skin and the earth, the scent that, though Pixel knew it to be impossible so soon after death, seemed to permeate so thickly into the atmosphere. 

She drew a deep breath in, and out, hoping beyond hope that it would cleanse her of that picture, of that scent that she had breathed in barely an hour earlier, but she didn’t feel better. 

Pixel opened her eyes and forced herself to continue forward, into the growing shadows of a day that seemed to be slipping past quicker than she ever could have imagined.


	18. Chapter 18

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hi guys and happy holidays!! No post last week because Christmas was a little crazy but I'm getting back to posting every Monday now.

The boy from Ten joined Praxis and Helene among the faces in the sky that night. Judging by their conversation, and the cannon that Pixel had heard early in the day, she had to assume this was the tribute that had supposedly fallen to his death.

She’d tucked herself into a similar rock formation as the night before, after climbing the ladders back up to the top level (slowly and painfully on her bad ankle). Pixel didn’t particularly like it up here, but she felt compelled to follow the orders that Sinclair had given her in her sponsor package. And he’d told her to keep the high ground. So, for now at least, she’d stay up here. 

Pixel had laid out the tarp this time, and curled up underneath it with the same kind of rock trap above her to alert the arrival of a tribute. Her skin felt better tonight that it had this morning- it didn’t sting uncomfortably when she moved anymore- but she knew that with her fair complexion she needed to avoid direct sun as much as possible. 

Sleeping would be easier tonight. While Pixel expected to be kept awake by the visions of Praxis and Helene’s deaths happening in front of her eyes, the exhaustion of the day caught up to her in a much more powerful way. And she was starting to drift to sleep when something landed on top of her tarp.

Pixel jolted up and ripped the tarp off her body, prepared to run in case a tribute had tripped her rock-and-string mechanism. But there was no such thing.

Instead, what sat on top of her was a small, light package lying underneath a parachute. Pixel’s heart lifted and she picked up the gift, pulling it under the tarp with her to light up the flashlight and see what she had been gifted.

It was no heavier than the pair of socks she’d taken from Praxis’s body earlier today, and Pixel ripped open the package to find a note sitting on top. 

_ Please be more cautious. Gifts will be smaller and harder to get from now on. Good luck. It looks like a sprain or a twist. -Beetee _

Practical as ever. Pixel didn’t care about the lack of sentiment as she pulled open the rest of the sponsor gift to find a simple fabric wrap. She sat and stared at it for a second in confusion, and then exhaled in relief.

It was a wrap for her bad ankle. In the package were basic pictures directing her how to wrap it effectively, and after a couple of tries of knotting it and tying it only for it to come undone, Pixel managed to pull it as tight as she could around her ankle, wrap it so it would stay, and maneuver it into a comfortable position. 

It wouldn’t solve all her problems. In fact, it would probably still be hard to walk on. But it was better. And she knew that her mentors were still watching, still cheering her on and strategizing so that, against all odds, she might win this thing.

Pixel fell asleep easily, exhaustion running through her body and begging for rest. 

She woke much earlier the next morning than she had the last. There was a cool breeze running through the air as she pulled the tarp off of herself, and when she looked around there was a sort of a calm spookiness in the empty top level of the arena. The edge of the canyon sat about fifty feet away from her, and over it she could see the top of the big, gnarled, dead tree reaching into the air as high as it could go. Several birds sat perched on its top branches, and Pixel shivered a bit as the breeze hit her again. 

The sky was cloudy today, which was perhaps why it felt so much cooler than yesterday. Pixel pulled the windbreaker tight around her body while she packed up the rest of her items into the backpack. She drank about half the water bottle, feeling confident she could now find a source of water, and dared to eat two strips of beef jerky to calm her aching stomach. 

While she’d grown up poor, she’d always had something to eat. Even if it was small or dried or pickled, the Delaroux family was notoriously resourceful with their food stores. Pixel had never had to survive on such a small amount before; she certainly hadn’t recently, after she’d taken up her pickpocketing habit and started being able to afford junk food at the corner stores. 

Letting her grumbling stomach dictate her movements, Pixel dug up a handful of granola from her pack and ate it bit-by-bit, resisting the urge to devour the entire pack in one sitting. 

Her stomach and her brain wanted her to finish the food, to swallow the rest of it down as if there would be more food waiting in an hour, like there always had been back in the Capitol. She’d grown spoiled already, Pixel realized. Subconsciously and selfishly she wanted the arrival of more food and water, she wanted to be waited on by an Avox holding a warm towelette and a cup of tea, she wanted all those luxuries that she’d been pretending to be excited for on that very first day she’d been Reaped. 

Pixel felt disgusted with herself at this realization. Her heart sunk in on itself. She, of course, wanted more than anything to be back to District Three. But after seeing how the Capitol lived in comparison to how she and her family had struggled back home, it was hard to imagine a return to that kind of life. 

But if she returned, she reminded herself, she wouldn’t be going back to that kind of life. A victor would be showered in riches and glory. Her district would be gifted as much food as it could eat for the next year. Her family and neighbors and classmates would want for nothing for an entire year. 

Was that what truly happened in District Eight this past year, after Cecelia won? And District Two before that, when Urban’s relative Rune took home the crown? 

They couldn’t have needed it more than Three, Pixel had to think, especially not Two. Or Four or One. It was an injustice that the rich districts were, more often than not, the ones gifted the winnings after the Games each year. She knew in her heart of hearts that, of course, the Capitol was the center of it all, the machine behind the evil of the Games. But Pixel could recognize a glimmer of resentment, frustration that it really was the rich districts who were constantly gifted even more riches while districts like Three were left to squander.

Pixel could now understand exactly why Sinclair had gotten involved in rebellion. As if the Games themselves weren’t enough, the districts were made to believe that the enemies were each other, rather than the Capitol. 

Pixel stood and walked to the edge of the cave, the same one she’d fallen into the day before. Her ankle, while still sore, was now sturdy enough to walk on carefully thanks to the wrap gifted to her by Beetee. She sat, cautiously, and leaned against the side of the cave while she wrapped the tarp as tightly as she could and shoved it into the bottom of her backpack.

As Pixel tidied up her belongings, and stopped herself from eating more jerky and granola, she perked up at a sudden whiff of something familiar. 

There was nothing but rock and dirt surrounding her on this top level. So Pixel was, theoretically, safe. But there was an unmistakable scent of smoke meeting her nostrils, and she turned her head to see a large plume of billowing black smoke behind her and off the ledge, not more than one hundred feet away. 

She stood up quickly, using the cave wall as balance for her bad ankle, and, against her better judgement, ran towards the smoke.

Pixel didn’t make it far. While she’d seen fire before, from a distance, and knew about smoke and how dangerous it could be (there were occasional building fires in District Three, of course), nothing could compare to the actuality of the choking, blistering heat and sting that wafted in her direction. 

In theory, she knew she was safe. The ledge upon which she stood was high enough to block flames from reaching her, and she wasn’t in any immediate danger where she was. But the sudden wracking cough, the sting permeating into her eyes, the dry and gritty air piercing her throat and nostrils were the most unpleasant physical experiences she’d ever put her body through. Pixel stepped backwards, no longer as curious about the fire close to her as she’d been twenty seconds earlier. 

She wanted her vision still trained on the smoke billowing upwards, and could see glimpses of flames flickering up the side of the canyon. With no thoughts, she simply stood and stared, watching the fire reach as high as it could. It was almost as if she was now glued to the spot; trees that were previously brushing the top level of the canyon were now falling one-by-one, rocks on the edge of the cliff were pulled down by the flaming branches, and just barely from the edge of her vision Pixel could see a small hand reaching up towards the top.

There was nowhere to hide, and Pixel swallowed down the fear that suddenly was gripping her heart as she pulled out her knife. She could run, she figured. And this person was escaping fire. Pixel would have the jump on them. 

But Pixel paused when she saw the glint of the large glasses of the girl from Five as she pulled herself onto the ground and collapsed. A cannon sounded, but it wasn’t the girl, who was now loudly sobbing in anguish.

Pixel once more couldn’t move as she let her eyes trace along the figure of the girl. Her hair, previously done in two neat braids with heavy bangs that fell over her bespectacled eyes, was now burnt off several inches from her scalp. Her black leggings had burnt away halfway down the thigh and her legs were bloody and mangled, singed nearly down to the bone. She shifted up and began retching onto the ground beneath her, the smoke inhalation creating the most horrific sound Pixel had ever heard. 

Tears streamed down the girl’s face, and the only weapon Pixel could see on her body was a loose bow which had had its string burned away. Three warped arrows sat in a quiver on her back which she tore away from her body and threw onto the ground. As she raised her arm to pull the quiver off Pixel caught the gruesome glimpse of another wound, this one deep into her ribs, where something sharp had slashed through her shirt and several layers of flesh. She was still retching and gagging, though nothing came out, and eventually she threw a fist onto the ground and screamed through her singed vocal chords.

Pixel winced at the sound and watched as the girl tried to pull in breaths of fresh air. She laid for a moment, then, for the first time, looked up to see Pixel watching, peering at her from behind her smoke-stained glasses and her raggedy bangs. 

Back in the Capitol, Pixel had thought the girl seemed quirky, cute, excitable. She’d rattled on about electricity and the lightning storms back in District Five. Even back when Pixel had seen her and her ally on the top level of the other side of the canyon, she’d seemed fine and relatively unbothered. It had only been a couple of days here in the arena, but it appeared that that girl was now gone.

There was anger and misery in her face as she looked at Pixel, who must have seemed completely unharmed, her bad ankle wrapped and somewhat healed. And Pixel could hardly stomach the realization that the other tributes hadn’t been hiding out as she had, and had been fighting, running, suffering in magnitudes beyond what she had seen herself. 

Another cannon broke the silence, and the girl from Five winced as if the sound was physically painful to her. She turned her eyes up to Pixel.

“Please, just…” she croaked, her voice hardly understandable through the smoke damage. “Don’t stand there and watch. Get it-”

She coughed and let out a deep, coarse retch before looking down at the small knife that Pixel hadn’t realized she was still holding. 

“Get it over with,” she breathed. “Please. I have a bigger-”

She coughed again, then weakly pulled back her windbreaker to show a dagger, much more deadly-looking than the practically useless knife Pixel had picked up at the Cornucopia.

“Don’t make me do it to myself,” the girl pleaded. The wound on her torso was bleeding profusely now, not seeming to agree with the position that she was now laying in. “I’m not going to last much… much longer and I… it’s going to hurt if… if it lasts too long.”

Pixel nodded, then stepped forward towards the girl. The fire behind her had moved past the ledge from which she had climbed up, and Pixel now found herself able to breathe as she walked to the dying tribute. 

“What’s your name?” Pixel asked softly, her throat pulling out the first verbal words she’d spoken in days. She followed the girl’s lead and pulled the dagger out from the windbreaker pocket.

“Fa-” she coughed again. “Fara.”

The arm that had been holding her up collapsed out from under her, and her glasses came crashing off of her face onto the red dirt. She moaned in pain, her breaths coming through rapidly and desperately, and Pixel knew what she had to do.

Pixel hadn’t considered the realization that she would most likely have to kill people in the arena. Most of her thoughts came around to simply surviving, dodging those that were bigger than her and keeping safe from hazards. The idea that she, the smallest tribute in the arena, would be killing other teenagers, hadn’t dawned on her until the moment she knelt down beside the dying girl and held the dagger firmly in her right hand.

Choking back emotion, Pixel drove the dagger into Fara’s chest using all her strength. The girl closed her eyes, seized for a second, let out a brief whimper, and fell completely limp. 

The third cannon blast of the morning exploded through the air. Pixel reached down and picked up the glasses that had fallen beside the dead girl, then carefully adjusted them back onto her face.

Pixel knelt for a couple minutes more, staring at the dead girl’s face, letting thoughts leave her mind. What she had done wasn’t something she could process right now; what she needed to do was leave. 

And, suddenly, that was the only thing on her mind. Without a second thought, Pixel Delaroux stood from where she had killed another person, and ran away as fast as she could, all pain in her ankle shoved to the back of her mind in favor of the overwhelming disgust she now felt flooding through her soul.


	19. Chapter 19

She found the river. The Careers didn’t seem to be anywhere near it, but part of her didn’t care. If they found her right now, Pixel would meet a swift, probably painless death. That was better than what Fara had gotten. 

But there was no movement, no voices or other people approaching as Pixel collapsed beside the bank of the river. 

After the death (she’d called it “murder” in her head exactly once before needing to repress a welling of panic deep in her chest), Pixel had run- or, rather, limped quickly on her bad ankle- along the length of the canyon edge until she couldn’t breathe anymore. Then she took a ladder down, and another, finding an entrance to the cave system underneath the rock. It was there Pixel entered, and found the entry to the underground cavern which the Careers had taken only the day before. She found the water, followed the small path along the current that earlier the group of older tributes had taken out of the cave, and soon enough came upon rushing water through the red, dusty canyon.

Here she collapsed, within the scraggly, brown brush that lined the banks of a creek which opened up into a wider river. It poked into her exposed skin and drew blood in a few spots on her arm, but Pixel didn’t care. She could hardly feel anything right now. Anything physical, at the very least. 

She looked up at the gnarled, gray tree that continued to overshadow the entire arena. Its twisting branches hung above her, where there sat more vultures than she’d seen earlier. There were at least ten now, staring down at the arena with beady, hungry eyes. One in particular seemed to train its gaze on her, watching her every breath as if each one was about to be her last. 

Pixel shook her head, keeping her eyes away from the sight of the gloomy birds, and turned her head to another corner of the arena, where a hovercraft was pulling the limp body of a tribute across the canyon and to a location far beyond her visibility. No other cannons had fired today; this was either Fara or one of the other two tributes who had died in the fire. 

She drew in a long, deep breath as she sat up in the harsh brush, then leaned over and cupped her hands into the creek. Pixel pulled her hands up to her mouth, drinking in the cold water and washing away the remainder of the smoke that she had inhaled earlier.

It was far fresher than the water back in the cave. Whether it was because she was out in the fresh air or because it had somehow lost the metallic taste, Pixel gulped down several handfuls of the water and couldn’t seem to fill herself full enough every time she finished the amount in her hands. Her stomach grumbled loudly, as if it were begging her to fill it with food instead of liquid, but the dryness at the back of her throat won the argument it seemed to be having, and she sipped more and more of the water down until, finally, she felt satiated and hydrated for the first time in several days.

Pixel sat and let her feet dangle in the flowing water, taking in deep breaths, then pulled out the backpack she’d taken from Helene and grabbed one strip of beef jerky. Her supply was about halfway finished, and it was only day three in the arena. She grit her teeth to keep the mild panic at bay (after all, what were the chances she’d even make it long enough to get to the bottom of her food supply?), and focused only on the flow of the water while ripping her teeth into the tough meat.

The creek was only a couple of feet deep, and flowed further into a larger river and pool of water down the way, where Pixel could hear the rushing of what she could only assume was a waterfall going down to a lower level of the canyon. 

Something hit her foot, and Pixel withheld a yelp as she yanked her leg up and looked further into the creek to see a small fish, which quickly diverted itself and continued swimming down through the water. It wasn’t alone, and Pixel could see another four or five fish passing her by. This could, in an ideal world, be a good option for food, she figured. Pixel was confident that she’d be able to weave a net out of the twine and wire she had (how hard could it be, anyway? It was just a few knots in the string), but doing so would require patience and a solid defense in case the Careers, or any other tributes, came to the water source.

So Pixel stood and decided to continue on, wincing as she planted her foot on the ground. It seemed that moving fast to get away from Fara wasn’t good for her healing ankle, and now that the adrenaline was wearing off she had most likely hurt it even more. She cringed at the idea, and the last thing she wanted to be was helpless, alone in this arena where there were eight other tributes remaining, all out to kill her. 

She moved to the ridge of the canyon, where she could more easily gain her bearings. It seemed she now stood on the second level of the gorge, not far from the ground level. The massive dead tree in the center now had even more vultures dotting its branches than just an hour ago, and it sat a decent distance to Pixel’s left, which meant she’d now traversed a large amount of this side of the canyon.

Theoretically, she could climb down to the bottom and run across to the other side. While the Careers had mentioned before that they’d been scouting the entire arena, Pixel had only ever seen them on this side of the canyon. Perhaps she would be safer across the gorge.

Then again, maybe that was the reason they weren’t here, at the water source, at this very moment. In order to get across to the other side, a tribute would have to get on the bottom level and run across, completely exposed.

Pixel sat on the ledge, letting her legs dangle down off the cliff as she considered her options. She wasn’t particularly safe  _ anywhere _ . That was the point. 

Her stomach let out an uncomfortable grumble, and Pixel couldn’t tell if it was because she was hungry or if it was because she had foolishly drank the creek water on the assumption that it was safe. Her heart sank as a mild cramp crept through her gut, but it was placid enough that she could try to ignore it.

She turned her head back to look at the creek. The idea of fishing and creating a net was one that was incredibly attractive to her; she would give her left arm for a fresh fish cooked over a nice fire right now. And Pixel pulled out her ball of twine just to see if her assumption was right, that a net would be completely doable. She could listen carefully for footsteps of approaching tributes while she worked, and if someone came for her she could slide down the rock and land on the bottom of the canyon; it had a slight slope to it so she wouldn’t be free-falling, anyway. 

It was optimistic in many ways. But perhaps most unrealistic was the idea that someone with no experience with knots beyond her shoelaces could create a net. The sun began to beat down overhead as Pixel toyed with the twine, pulling and knotting and undoing it over and over again, frustration building as it became all too clear that this wasn’t something she could teach herself. 

Pixel had a lot of natural talents. Sneaking, thieving, lying had all come easily to her. When they’d taught her coding in the factories so she could cover for coworkers who had to take days off, she learned it quickly and without problems. Even back in her public training sessions, making a fire and building shelter hadn’t been things that had been difficult for her. 

Knot-tying and net-making, she was quickly learning, were not similar to any of these things. After an hour, she’d managed to mangle her ball of twine into an inescapable Gordian knot that she couldn’t ply apart even with her small, nimble fingers. Letting out a huff of frustration, she drew the thing back and threw it as hard as she could down into the canyon, looking up for the first time in a while.

What she now saw was a whole flock of vultures, and their eyes were trained on two figures climbing down from the other side of the canyon.

Pixel wasn’t able to make out who the two tributes were who were coming down onto the ground level. That much was obscured when the first foot hit the ground, and the vultures took off. She stood quickly. As the ball of twine hit the ground, no fewer than five vultures out of the nearly twenty that had gathered darted towards it, while the other vultures (muttations, Pixel could now assume), dived to where the two tributes were now running across the clearing towards her side of the canyon. 

Screams erupted from one of the tributes, and as the two of them sprinted across and got closer to Pixel- to the ladder that Pixel was only about ten feet from- she could finally recognize them. Georgia and Isadora, both of them wide-eyed and terrified, were running as fast as they physically could towards Pixel. And while part of her knew inside that the both of them were probably out to kill her, or would be eventually, her gut told her to help them. 

Pixel hobbled quickly over to the top of the ladder where the girls were headed, and reached out. Georgia, at the front, was only about twenty feet from the base, and though the vultures were fairly close to Pixel now, they didn’t seem interested in her. It looked to her as if they only cared about what was on the ground level of the canyon.

“Georgia!” Pixel called out, her throat still scratchy and painful from the smoke inhalation earlier in the day. “Take my hand!”

Georgia, who hadn’t seemed to notice her until now, looked up with brightened eyes at the younger girl as she beat off a vulture with her left hand. Isadora, shielding her eyes with one arm, looked towards Pixel with little to no reaction, and continued running about five feet behind Georgia. 

One of the vultures dug its beak into Georgia’s collarbone and she fell to the ground, crying out in pain. Isadora caught up and reached down, grabbing her hand and yanking her up to her feet while another vulture mutt screeched an ungodly sound directly at her face. She pulled Georgia in front of her and pushed her to the ladder. 

As soon as Georgia took her second foot off the ground, the vultures left her alone, but that didn’t stop her from frantically reaching for Pixel’s hand and pulling herself up, wild-eyed and terrified and watching for Isadora to follow.

Pixel offered a hand to the other girl as well, who took it warily and sat on the ledge of the second level with the others.

“Oh, Pixel, thank  _ goodness _ .” Before Pixel could react, Georgia had swept her up into a deep, caring hug. Pixel froze, not sure how to respond. She’d expected at least a little bit of defensiveness, if not outright hostility. “I knew you were probably alone and I told Izzy I hoped you were okay, and I’m so glad you are!”

Isadora sighed and remained sitting on the ground, turning her head up to notice the river rushing past them. “Is this the only water source on this side of the canyon?”

Pixel nodded as Georgia let her go. “As far as I could tell. There’s some of it up in a cave further on but it leads down to here. And… thanks, Georgia. I… hoped you were okay, too.”

She wasn’t going to admit that she’d barely thought about any tributes other than the Careers and the girl she’d killed only this morning, of course. And Pixel had watched them at the Cornucopia, had seen Isadora make that kill without hesitation. She had figured it was best to keep the two of them out of her thoughts, and now it seemed she was going to have to pay in guilt for that. 

“Please stick with us for now,” Georgia took her hand and begged. It was only now that Pixel could truly see the toll that the past few days in the arena had taken on her. Already there was a large yellowish bruise forming on her neck where the vulture had hit her, and her curly black hair was scraggly and unkept, pulling out of the tall ponytail it had been pulled up into earlier. She had a long cut extending down the right side of her face, from her temple down past her ear and finishing below her jawline. Her clothes were filthy, as if she’d been crawling through mud. “Please. We need the company and another number for our side in case we meet someone else as scary as that girl from One.”

“The girl from One?” Pixel asked, tilting her head. “You saw her alone? Is she not with the rest of her alliance anymore?”

“No,” Isadora answered, pulling her hefty backpack off. It bulged with items, and Pixel could feel her stomach ache again as she noticed the large bag of nuts tucked away into a side pocket. The girl from Eleven dug into the bag and pulled out a small bottle filled with dark tablets. “We saw it happen. Looks like she lost her brother and she’s gone a little-”

She twirled her finger around the side of her head. “Cuckoo.”

Pixel swallowed. “Yeah, I actually watched that. The girl from Four got him, and Miriam- the girl from One- she killed her in response, and then the other Careers took off with her.”

“Yeah, well she didn’t like somethin’ about how they were strategizin’ during the Games,” Georgia pulled off her own backpack, which also was packed much fuller than Pixel’s. Pixel felt a pang of jealousy run through her body, knowing this was the price she paid for not going into the Cornucopia, and the tips of her fingers began to tingle the way they did back in Three when she felt the need to steal something off of a merchant’s stall.

_ No _ , Pixel told her herself inwardly.  _ They’re being kind, and they’re offering protection. And they’ll probably share what they have. _

She bit back that reflex for the moment.

“And she yelled some real strong words at ‘em,” Georgia continued. “Now she’s alone and the other three are all still together, we think. We were hidin’ out in a real big tree and saw the whole thing, didn’t we?”

Isadora nodded, then stood and opened up a metal water bottle she’d pulled from her bag. She dropped one of the tablets into it, walked over to the river, and filled the bottle, then sealed it shut. 

“I think the river’s safe to drink from,” Pixel told her, though she still hadn’t figured out if the small cramp in her stomach was from hunger pains or the unfiltered river water.

“Better safe than sorry,” Isadora told her. “You should probably put one of these in your water bottle, too, just to make sure. I got a ton of ‘em from the Cornucopia, somehow, so we’re not going to run out before the Games finish unless they go for, like, a month.”

“Oh, please no,” Georgia breathed. “Don’t even put that out into the universe, Izzy.”

Isadora ignored the comment and turned to Pixel.

“So… do you have shelter anywhere? We need a place to hole up while the rest of the tributes pick each other off. Gamemakers probably won’t let us stay anywhere for long, but better-”   


“Better safe than sorry,” Georgia finished her sentence. “You’ve been sayin’ that for the last three days.”

Pixel smiled a bit, then her stomach sank. She truly would have rather died than return to her previous place of shelter, the top ridge of the canyon where she was forced to kill a tribute earlier this very day. 

“Uh, no,” she lied. “I’ve been camping out in, like, bushes and places. It’s been easy for me to hide since I’m small.”

“Come on, then,” Isadora walked towards the cave on this level of the canyon, where Pixel had exited only a couple of hours before. “Let’s get going.”


	20. Chapter 20

The girls took turns staying up throughout the night and watching the camp which, under further deliberation, Pixel realized was a much smarter way of protecting themselves than her previous rock-and-twine contraption (not that that would be a viable option anymore, what with her twine having been thrown off the cliff earlier that day). Isadora insisted Georgia stay up first, noting that she was the one both of the other tributes trusted the most. Pixel didn’t complain, but woke up several hours in for the second watch.

As she sat in watch, her fingers twinged again, wondering if the other tributes would really notice if a handful of nuts or an apple had gone missing. But she’d been correct earlier; the two of them had kindly shared their goods with her, and in return she let them use her tarp for protection, and her flint to create a small fire in the cave where they hid out. Georgia, it turned out, had done a large amount of fishing back home on her ranch in District Ten, and snagged a couple of small trout. They looked different from the trout caught in the lake in District Three, but Pixel trusted her that they were safe to eat, and the three of them satiated themselves that night with cooked seafood and purified water. 

Pixel’s stomach cramps passed after several hours and a good while in a bush, which reminded her of Blight’s lesson not to be caught with her pants down. How humiliating, she had thought, and had hoped that the cameras weren’t trained on her. If there was one thing she would never live down if she ever got back home, it was ignoring a trainer’s advice and nearly soiling her pants because of unpurified river water. 

She accepted all of Isadora’s offers of iodine tablets after that. 

So the other two, it seemed, were more than inclined to share with her, and there was no need to steal from them. The reason she was a thief back home, she had to remind herself, was because she was poor and otherwise wouldn’t have had access to the items she took. There was absolutely  _ no need  _ right now. 

Pixel buried the itch once again, and simply sat and watched the stars until it was time to wake Isadora for her turn to watch. 

Day four in the arena began with more blazing sun beating down onto the tributes of the 60th Hunger Games. Pixel woke groggily in the brush where they had taken shelter, tucked away into a corner behind a grouping of trees, where the brown tarp concealed the two sleeping girls as well as they could manage while the third sat in watch. They were on the fourth level of six (Isadora had asserted that there were, indeed, six levels of the canyon) and had explored the day before, only to find the haunting charred remains of level five. 

The fire yesterday had taken out nearly the entire level on this side of the canyon, and while trees still stood with burnt bark protecting their inner layers of wood, every smaller piece of brush and greenery had been destroyed in the blaze. Georgia had yelped in surprise when she’d stepped on the remains of a dead squirrel, a sickening crunch sounding from beneath her foot, and Pixel had nearly gotten sick from the thought of what had happened to the girl she’d needed to kill.

Isadora told them about the orchard fires in District Eleven during dry years, and said that it looked like a fire someone had set and perhaps fallen asleep next to instead of putting out. This morning, the smell of smoke remained sitting on top of the arena, though there were no fires that seemed to remain in sight.

“There are fires in Ten, too,” Georgia noted as she kicked a burnt stump over with her foot. The trio was now walking through the fifth level again, seeing if they could scavenge any leftovers from the tributes who had died yesterday. Pixel had not told them that one of those tributes had died by her own hand. “Not where I am. More on the west side of the District. It’s too humid over where I live.”

“Is it hot, then?” Pixel asked, trying not to go too pale as her eyes darted through the rubble. She had seen too many dead bodies in the last few days, and a large part of her didn’t care to find any potential remains, though the hovercrafts would have picked up the bodies by now. “If there are fires?”

“Oh yes,” Georgia nodded. “Hotter ‘n hell, my daddy says.”

“It’s cold in Three,” Pixel responded. “At least in winter. Our summers are nice, but winter can get really bad. There’s so much snow and ice that the only place you can really get warm is at work in the factories.”

“Snow and ice,” Georgia repeated, bending down to pick something up. It was a stick no shorter than three feet long, and she kept a grip on it to use it to help her pick through the ash. “I’ve never seen snow. Not in person. How about you, Izzy?”

Isadora shook her head. While she’d become a little more talkative than she had been when she’d first met Pixel in training, and even when they’d met again in the arena, she still wasn’t quick to disclose any personal details about herself. At least none that weren’t pertinent to survival in the current moment. 

“Well,” Georgia continued. “I remember those Games a few years ago when it was all snowy. And there was the big forest with all the pine trees in the mountains?”

She was referencing the Games that Blight had won. While the Hunger Games occurred in the middle of July, the Gamemakers always seemed to be able to pull out any weather they chose for their desired arenas. Whether the snowy mountain of the 56th Games was natural or climate-controlled could only be left up to guesswork.

“Yeah, I remember those ones,” Pixel nodded.

“Well that got District Ten talkin’ like crazy,” Georgia rambled on. “Like we saw all kinds of snow and stuff when they televised victory tours in the middle of winter. We know it gets snowy and cold in places like Two and Three. But we- or I- didn’t know that it was possible to have that much! There had to be two feet of snow in some places on that mountain, didn’t there?”

Pixel nodded remembering how several of the Careers had somehow managed to build an igloo those Games. Her mother had suspected foul play on the part of their mentors, unfair insight into the arena before the Games actually started that gave the Careers time to learn skills like igloo-building. It made sense to Pixel then. 

It made sense to Pixel now, when she thought about it. The Capitol benefited the most when Careers won, because those Districts were the ones most loyal. As if the kids from there didn’t have enough of a leg up already, Pixel couldn’t help but wonder if there were other, even more sinister devices at play in the already insidious Games. 

“There was a lot of snow,” Pixel agreed.

“Oh, I’d love to see that much snow in my lifetime,” Georgia sighed. “It seems so dreamy.”

Pixel snorted a little and smirked. “No you wouldn’t.”

Georgia lifted her head a bit, surprised at Pixel’s curtness. “What do you mean?”

Isadora turned her head and slightly lifted an eyebrow, her jaw tightening a miniscule amount. Pixel didn’t miss her hand tightening around the knife in her fingers, which she had been using to cut away dead brush. Pixel had let her facade down for a half a second, and suddenly her act- that she was still small and helpless and meek- was in danger of being completely blown apart. Not that Isadora bought it for a second, Pixel thought.

“Oh,” Pixel softened her face again. “I mean… it’s just so wet and cold. It’s fun for a little bit, but really it just gets all gray and slushy in the street. When you have to walk places it’s not very fun.”

“Hmph,” Isadora let out an unintelligible noise and shuffled further through. “I don’t think there’s much on this level. We should get moving in case we catch sight of anyone. Do you guys see a cave entrance anywhere nearby?”

Georgia pointed to one less than fifty feet from where they stood, and Isadora nodded and followed. Pixel wordlessly trailed the two of them, limping slightly on her ankle. 

She didn’t know if it was actually sprained, like she thought it might have been at first, because she felt like a sprain would have lasted longer and been more painful than this. After last night’s rest her ankle, while not exactly feeling completely better, was down to a dull ache when she stepped on it. She’d pointed it out to Georgia and Isadora when they’d set up camp the other day, but neither of them had much more healing knowledge than she did. 

Feeling somewhat guilty about it, Pixel limped more dramatically than was necessary on the ankle this morning. Georgia was friendly and giving and caring to her, and Isadora, though colder, welcomed her to an extent. That didn’t mean Pixel wouldn’t need to make a dash away from them when they didn’t expect it. 

The trio reached the entrance of the cave and listened carefully, though nothing could be heard but the consistent and distant  _ drip drip dripping _ of the water in the same cavern that the trails on this side of the canyon all seemed to lead to. Georgia waved them through and entered behind them. 

A cannon blasted nearby, and the three tributes all nearly jumped out of their skins. From a distance behind them they could hear the yells of several boys, though Pixel could not discern if she recognized them or not, and Isadora gritted her teeth.

“ _ Let’s go _ ,” she insisted, grabbing Georgia’s wrist and pulling her forward, leaving Pixel somewhat behind as she strained to catch up on her bad foot. It hurt more now that she was running on it. 

“Wait-” Pixel tried her best to run behind them, but adrenaline could not be willed as easily as she wished, and it hurt to try to keep pace.

“We can’t afford to go slow,” Isadora turned her head back, her long braids whipping around her face.

“We can’t even see whoever made those noises. They might not even be that close,” Pixel insisted, trying her best to run to catch up still. The two girls gained distance ahead of her and Pixel reached out to try and grab Georgia’s other hand but to no avail. The two of them were too far ahead. “Wait!”

But before she could catch up, the two other tributes rounded a corner within the cave beyond the stretch of daylight pouring into the entrance. Pixel turned the corner and tried running further, but her ankle gave out from beneath her and she collapsed in the darkness. 

“Stop!” she called out, her heart sinking into her stomach. Were they really going to leave her here? “Guys, I fell! I need help!”

But she heard only the sound of footsteps growing more and more distant. A rare well of emotion grew in Pixel’s chest, and she felt all her words escape her while she tried to call out to her allies. That was all it took. One scare and they left her behind for the wolves.

“Please,” she called out feebly, pulling herself up to her feet. Her ankle hurt more now than it had while she tried to run on it, and to keep herself stable she propped herself up against the wall of the cave. 

But she heard nothing. Georgia, who had been so nice to her, was now gone. And Isadora, though cold and pragmatic, had shared her goods and her knowledge. They were supposed to be her allies. Pixel swallowed back a choked sob that was threatening to erupt from her throat. She didn’t want to be alone again. Not now, and not ever. 

Pixel’s few days in the Capitol had been the most alone she’d ever been in her life until she’d entered the arena. And then here, in this desolate wilderness, she was relegated to even worse solitude. The emergence of two tributes- two humans who could have killed her within seconds- had been fresher than that first drink of spring water she’d taken the day before. The intense longing she felt to be in the presence of someone who cared about her, whether it was her parents or her siblings or Sinclair or Georgia, was something she’d have never guessed would become something so innate to her being. 

She didn’t realize tears were falling down her face until one dripped into her mouth. The saltiness took her by surprise and she pulled in a quick intake of air.

“ _ No! I told you- _ ”

Pixel’s head darted up to look down the length of the cave, her eyes now having adjusted to the darkness. Two familiar figures were making their way back down, and Pixel collapsed once again, this time in relief.

“We’re not leavin’ her behind,” Georgia’s muffled voice came much more harshly than Pixel had ever heard it. “I said yesterday we’re teamin’ up with her and I meant it.”

“ _ She’s slowing us down _ ,” Pixel could only barely make out the whispers of Isadora’s voice, but they were there, speaking as if she wasn’t less than one hundred feet away from where Pixel sat. “ _ If she gets us stuck with some Career because we couldn’t get away fast enough- _ ”

“Don’t worry about that,” The form of Georgia’s head turned towards Pixel, and suddenly she was taking off down the cavern. Within seconds she was at her side, kneeling down next to the collapsed kid.

“Pixel, I’m so sorry,” she breathed. “We just got caught up in the moment. But we’re not leavin’ you. Not if we can help it.”

Pixel looked up and nodded, wiping the tears from her eyes. 

“Thank you,” she smiled gratefully. “That means-”

“Don’t worry about it,” Georgia pulled her hefty backpack off her shoulders. “Is it your ankle? Is it botherin’ you?”

Pixel nodded again, then pulled herself back up to a standing position. “I can put pressure on it, but I think running is out of the question for now.”

“Get on my back,” Georgia turned around, pulling the backpack onto her chest so she could balance more easily. “Come on. I’m strong, I had to carry sheep around the ranch at home. You’re not much bigger than a young ewe, and I’ve had to cart around shit much bigger than that.”

Pixel let out a small laugh. “You’ll look ridiculous.”

“I don’t care,” Georgia laughed back. “I can worry about my looks if I get back home. Get on.”

Isadora had made it back and was only watching with a neutral expression.

“I’m sorry we left you behind,” she said without emotion. “Fight or flight. You know.”

Pixel nodded, but didn’t say anything as she used her good ankle to hop onto Georgia’s back. And, without looking back, the motliest crew remaining in the arena set forward once again.


	21. Chapter 21

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Well friends, it's official. I've finished writing Miscreant (though the last 9 chapters still have yet to be posted- 30 in total!!). I'm posting a mid-week update as a bit of a celebration of that. It's a weird feeling, because I'm someone who never finishes anything, at least any writing project I've ever started. The amount of times I've told myself I would do something like NaNoWriMo or a full-ass fanfic and then never actually gotten through those projects would astound literally everyone. But thank you so much for reading my story about my little chaotic neutral shit who I love more than anything.
> 
> That being said, I'm working on project number two right now! I doubt it will start going up until a few weeks after this fic is done, but it will be following a tribute of the 61st Games- I'm considering it a "sequel-ish" sister fic to this one, as it'll be following someone completely different from a wholly separate district, but the events of this fic will have transpired in the canon of the next one. I have a title, main character, and very basic plot set up for that one, but that's about it. I'm excited to get diving in! I've also been doing a lot of filling-in of worldbuilding (because while Suzanne created a fantastic story she REALLY did not worldbuild to my satisfaction and there are SO MANY gaps), which includes my own map of Panem. Let me know if you'd like to see it at the end of the fic!
> 
> I also want to spend a little bit of time giving public credit to some friends of mine who may or may not be reading this, as several characters in the fic take inspiration from them and characters they've written. Pixel originated in the depths of tumblr roleplay, and the story that I am writing takes notes from things that my friends have assisted with (with their blessings, of course!). The fic is entirely my writing, but characters like Georgia, Fara, (this take on) Wiress, and Cecelia would be completely different without their talents.
> 
> For now, I'm glad you guys seem to be enjoying my writing? It's wild to me that people actually read what I write and appear to like it but I certainly won't complain about that! Especially given how horrible this past year has been. This fic has been one of the things keeping me sane and busy during the pandemic and I just want to thank you guys for keeping up with this thing as it gets longer and trucking through it with me!

The three tributes didn’t do much the rest of the day. They came back upon the cavern that Pixel had passed through two or three times already, where Helene and Praxis had met their ends, and upon further inspection Georgia found another small inlet hidden among the stalagmites of the cave. 

When nightfall came around, Isadora insisted on taking a walk outside to watch the names light up across the sky. She returned ten minutes later to report that it had been the boy from Twelve that had met his end today. Leo, she called him.

“We met a couple of times,” she recalled grimly. “He was nice. I kinda didn’t expect him to make it this long, so good for him, I guess. Our mentors, Chaff and Haymitch, are really good friends, and they introduced us.”

“My mentor is friends with Brutus from Two,” Pixel said off-the-cuff. She hadn’t spoken much at all to Isadora the rest of the day. After the girl had tried to leave her behind, the two of them had fallen into an uneasy tension. “I thought they were trying to set something up between his tributes and us, but obviously that wasn’t the case.”

A flash of the memory of Urban taking off Cable’s head returned to Pixel’s mind, and she willed it away, gritting her teeth to rid herself of the image. 

“What? An alliance between Two and Three?” Georgia asked, pulling her knees in towards her chest. They’d set up a small fire in the alcove in which they sat, and gathered around it for the moment, though Isadora insisted they only let it burn for an hour at the maximum, so as not to attract attention. “That would be awfully odd, considerin’ the history of the Career pack and all that.”

“I know, I thought it was weird,” Pixel shrugged. “But Brutus was always in our suite talking to Sinclair in his room, so… I don’t know, maybe they’re just good friends.”

Georgia raised an eyebrow and turned her head to Isadora, who smirked and returned the expression. “Talkin’ to Sinclair? In his room?”

“Yeah,” Pixel shrugged. “He was there in the evenings when things were slowing down.”

“Oh,” for the first time that Pixel had ever seen, Isadora cracked a small smile. “Oh, _honey_.”

Pixel felt a small amount of frustration rising in her chest. Was Isadora laughing at her? After she’d just tried to ditch her? But Georgia also giggled a little bit and covered her mouth with her hand, and somehow that made Pixel feel slightly better.

“What?” Pixel asked, her face falling in confusion. Had she missed something important? Should she have gotten to know Brutus better in hopes of having a better relationship with District Two? “What am I missing?”

“ _Girl_ ,” Georgia giggled. “Do they teach y’all about relationships over in District Three? Or is it all just numbers and computers?”

Pixel knit her brows together. Of course there were relationships in Three. Her sister India had had a couple of boyfriends, and Coda was currently seeing one of the neighbor boys. Pixel herself had never been particularly interested in relationships so she hadn’t paid much mind to either of them. 

“We have relationships!” she answered simply, crossing her arms over one another. “Not like _I’m_ interested in them, but… people have them.”

“Well, honey, so do your mentors. And Brutus and Sinclair are doing a hell of a lot more than talking in that room, if you catch my drift,” Isadora answered, standing up to pace around the fire for a bit. “How old are you, anyway? I feel like at your age I was looking at boys.”

“I’m fourteen. Almost fifteen,” Pixel answered, scratching her head. Her birthday was getting really close, and part of her felt a little anxious that she hadn’t kept track of what today’s date was. The Hunger Games always occurred in July, with the tail end of the Games ending on or around the same day as her birthday, which was the 28th. “If I’m lucky I might get to celebrate in the arena.”

“ _Lucky_ ,” Isadora snorted a bit. “Spending your birthday in the arena and calling it lucky. Wild.”

“Hey, I can’t even believe I’ve survived this long,” Pixel leaned back. “If I’ve made it to my birthday I’ll call that a win.”

“Anyway,” Isadora ran her hand along the side of her long braids. “Georgia, how about you? Any boys back home?”

“Izzy I can’t believe you’re askin’ about home!” Georgia slapped her arm lightly. “You haven’t opened up to me before this.”

“Yeah, well,” she took a deep breath. “It’s boring only talking about the arena. If we’re going to be stuck together for who-knows-how-long, might as well.”

“I ain’t complainin’,” Georgia laughed. “Yeah, there was a boy back home. Emphasis on ‘was’. Screw ‘im.”

“What?” Pixel perked up. Hearing Georgia speak badly about someone was a first. Even more surprising was the right hand she raised above the fire, pointing her middle finger up clearly in the light. 

“Think the cameras can see that?” Georgia asked, moving the rude gesture around for a few seconds. “Screw ‘im. That boy just about ruined my life. Just before the reaping, too. I couldn’t’a been happier to get out of the District, even if it was for all this.”

“Wow,” Isadora coughed, then took a deep breath. “I mean, good for you, I guess. Couldn’t be me.”

“Izzy, you ain’t said a word about back home,” Georgia turned her head. “Who are you goin’ back to if you win this thing?”

Isadora rolled her eyes and shrugged. “Family. I got some friends, too.”

“Oh, come on!” Georgia insisted. “I need more than that!”

“I’m not trying to win so that I can return home to anyone,” Isadora answered neutrally. “I’m just trying to survive, ok? It’s not complicated, I just didn’t choose to be here.”

Pixel exhaled and chewed on the inside of her cheek. That was true; none of the three of them had chosen to be here, and at the end of the day they really were just trying to survive. And while Pixel didn’t think she would ever truly trust Isadora after the stunt she’d pulled earlier today, she had no choice but to lean on her and Georgia for the moment. It would be the only way to get through this for as long as possible. Besides, her ankle had been acting up ever since she’d taken the tumble, and she needed the security of two other people so that she could spend today and tomorrow letting it rest.

“We should put the fire out soon,” Isadora said after a moment of silence. Georgia and Pixel begrudgingly agreed, though the cave was damp and cold, and the three of them threw soil on top of the dying flames and stomped it out with their feet.

The girls once again took the night watch in shifts, and Pixel volunteered to go first tonight. Her stomach had been turning over itself ever since she’d been briefly left in the cave, and she needed some time to let herself settle down and get sleepy. 

For the first couple of hours, it was uneventful. Boring, even. Pixel began to feel herself drift off, and then lifted her head when she heard a sound that wasn’t the continued dripping of the water off the stalactites. A soft shuffling, like footsteps, froze Pixel into place, and she couldn’t see through the darkness.

The footsteps were frantic and erratic, almost inhuman, and Pixel reached for the nearest body laying close to her- Isadora, she thought- when the footsteps grew soft again. Blood rushed through her ears and she realized her teeth were tightly clenched together. The footsteps stopped, and Pixel loosened her jaw to hear a slurping sound, like whatever it was- or _who_ ever it was- was slurping water off the stalagmites and from the cave walls. It was thirsty, and just looking for a drink, Pixel had to tell herself. 

She closed her eyes to try and calm herself down, not that it was blocking out anything to see in the pitch blackness of the cave, and she waited. It was only a couple of minutes, but soon enough the slurping sound ceased, and the footsteps began again, growing even softer and softer until ultimately they had left the cavern with the three vulnerable tributes. 

When Pixel’s heart had returned to its normal rate, she woke Isadora for the next watch, telling her about what she’d heard. The girl told her that it was most likely a nocturnal animal that lived in these parts of the desert, though there was an unmistakable twinge of concern in her voice. 

With that, Pixel settled in, and let herself drift away into an uneasy sleep.

She woke the next morning to Georgia and Isadora building another fire. The cavern wasn’t much lighter than it had been in the middle of the night, but there were a few precious rays that had inched their way towards its walls. It was lighter in the morning than it had even been back when Pixel had visited in the afternoon for her Career-death viewing session. 

“Oh, you’re awake,” Georgia said distractedly. She had Pixel’s flint in one hand and was dashing a knife against it with the other. “Izzy told me about the thing you heard in the night. No other disturbances, don’t you worry.”

Pixel nodded and wiped the sleep from her eyes. 

“Are we planning on just staying here all day?” she yawned. The inlet in the cavern was squared off enough that Pixel felt fairly certain they would never be found unless there were kids out hunting for other tributes. And at this juncture, that very well might have been the case.

“Uh, we hadn’t discussed it,” Isadora answered as Georgia got a few sparks going. “I think this might be a solid place to stay, if that’s okay with you.”

Pixel nodded. “I wouldn’t mind letting my ankle heal a little bit more before we move on to somewhere else.”

Georgia seemed relieved to have settled on a day of rest within the Games, though she volunteered to refill all of the water bottles. Isadora, the night before, had found a shortcut to the creek in the canyon, and gave Georgia directions, who nodded and left the two of them for no more than twenty minutes. 

They were awkward, Pixel had to admit. She still got the feeling that Isadora didn’t particularly like her, though there was no concrete evidence to prove that (other than the incident the day before, which Isadora herself still chalked up to fight-or-flight instinct). At the very least, Isadora didn’t seem to have any inclination towards attacking or getting rid of her at this juncture. Perhaps it was simply an uneasy distrust of each other; it was something that Pixel herself had experienced with other kids in her class at home. 

She didn’t have many friends in District Three. She had never felt the need to make them, if she was being honest with herself; Vista and her other siblings were all she needed. Besides, she’d been caught red-handed with items stolen from other kids’ desks and lockers too often to be popular amongst the fourteen-year-old crowd. After a while they simply kept themselves- and their items- as far as possible away from the little “ginger klepto”, as they liked to call her. 

It was a well-deserved nickname. Even Pixel could admit that. 

Perhaps it was a problem, the stealing, she thought to herself as she once again eyed the items that Isadora pulled out of the pack. There were packs of energy bars, hats and pairs of mittens, batteries for her flashlight. If one of those things went missing there was _no way_ the other two would notice. 

But they were both here with her and taking care of her, she reminded herself once again. And they would share if she only asked. 

It was, to the great relief of all three tributes, the most uneventful day in the arena yet. No cannons fired. No tributes came through the cavern. No fires raged and no animals or muttations appeared to drive them away from their campsite. The girls chatted about stupid things like Caesar Flickerman’s hair color and what their favorite desserts were back in the Capitol. And when they grew tired, they once again took it in watches and fell asleep, this time much more restfully than the days preceding. 

That changed when Pixel awoke to a scream from Georgia, and opened her eyes to come face-to-face with the biggest, angriest coyote mutt she’d ever dreamed of seeing.


	22. Chapter 22

Coyotes were not scary animals, Pixel’s brother Rom had once told her. They were scrappy and smaller than one would imagine, mostly scavenging old carcasses from roadkill, though they would venture out and kill small dogs and cats if left unattended. Apparently he had read about this in a book at school, though Pixel couldn’t vouch for that herself. 

This coyote was nothing of the sort. It stood no smaller than three feet tall, and seemed as though it was prepared to pounce, much like a mountain lion raring for its first meal in weeks. There was no doubt about it: this was a muttation, a Capitol-bred animal mutant created solely for the Hunger Games. 

Isadora stood three feet from her, stock still, her stuffed backpack held in one hand with a vice-like grip. Pixel lay on the ground next to the now-dead fire, and Georgia was behind the both of them, breathing heavily.

“That ain’t a normal coyote,” Georgia let out in a shaky whisper. “Even then, the ones at home weren’t friendly when we caught ‘em stealin’.”

Pixel turned her head to see her picking up the last of her items. At Isadora’s behest the night before, they’d all packed up in case they needed to make a quick exit in the morning, but Georgia had apparently pulled out some items in the night. 

The coyote stood to the right side of the alcove of the cave they were in. There was an exit to the left that Pixel could see from the corner of her eye, but could they outrun the thing? Its lips were curled over its teeth, its eyes fiery with anger. It would only be minutes at the max before it attacked.

Pixel shifted back and the coyote opened its mouth to show its unnatural two-inch-long canine teeth, bared and gleaming only feet from her face. Her heart racing and blood rushing through her ears, she reached back slowly, looping her hand around the strap of her own backpack. She shifted her foot against a rock, giving her leverage to push herself so that she could run when needed. 

“Guys,” she muttered, looking back at Isadora and Georgia. “As soon as I get moving, run.” 

“Towards the river,” Isadora agreed, barely making out the words under her breath.

Pixel didn’t wait for Georgia to respond before shoving herself up to her feet and running as fast as she could. Her ankle still throbbed with a dull ache but it was nothing compared to the fear that coursed through her veins. Isadora and Georgia both were already running at top speed, Isadora yelling obscenities as Georgia tried to keep herself from screaming. 

The coyote yelped with an ungodly sound and pounced. Its claws raked towards Pixel but they slid off the backs of her shoes as she moved forwards. She weaved through stalagmites, following her allies towards the exit from the cave. Eventually she pulled herself into a clearing, pushing forward and trying to keep pace with the other two girls. 

Suddenly a searing pain wracked through Pixel’s right leg and she went crashing to the ground. She screamed in terror and looked back to see the coyote’s razor-sharp maw dug into the back of her calf, blood already beginning to soak into her leggings. 

“ _ No! _ ” she screamed as she flipped herself over. Using her left leg, she kicked frantically at the mutt’s face. She was now close enough to the entrance of the cave to see clearly, and could see the patches of gray fur rippling down its body, the muscles of the creature straining and working to pull her back towards it so it could get a better grip with its teeth on her. 

The pain was worse than anything she’d ever felt before. Tears streamed down her face as she kicked with her left foot to no avail. It didn’t let go and she felt more and more panic surge through her body. 

Suddenly, a shriek rang out from beside her and the jaws released from her leg. 

There was another shriek, and Pixel looked up to see Georgia standing above her with a crowbar that Pixel had never seen before. She must have had it hidden in her huge backpack, she figured as she shuffled backwards. 

The coyote yelped again, this time in pain as Georgia brought down the crowbar onto its skull. 

“Pixel,  _ go! _ ” she yelled at the girl. A hand appeared from nowhere and Pixel grabbed it on instinct, realizing it was Isadora pulling her up to her feet. 

The coyote yelped again, and Pixel began to run before turning her head to see Georgia swinging the crowbar down once more with all of her strength. The coyote hit the floor, and Georgia drew in a quick breath, her eyes wide. 

“Come on, Georgia!” Isadora yelled, and Georgia, who seemed to have been momentarily frozen in a state of shock, turned towards the other girls. Without another moment of hesitation she took off from her left leg and sprinted towards the exit to the cave. 

The coyote rose to its feet, and before it could follow the girls again all three tributes took off in the direction of the river. They didn’t look back as they left the cave, but there wasn’t any sound of the creature following them. Eventually Pixel dared a look back to see the thing still in pursuit, though it was slow and dazed, limping at a pathetic pace.

Georgia seemed to have slowed the mutt down enough, and by the time they had passed through the river and reached the ladder up to the next level, the three girls all felt assured that they had safely evaded the threat of the moment.

“Come on,” Isadora breathed from the top of the ladder, pulling herself up to the next level of the canyon. “We can-”

She stood and froze in place, her eyes growing wide. 

“What?” Pixel asked as she followed, wincing as she felt the bite wound from the coyote scream in pain. She could hardly process just why Isadora suddenly couldn’t move from her spot, or why she simply stood and stared where she had landed. 

Pixel emerged onto the next ground level, and felt her stomach flip in on itself at the sight of three Careers not one hundred feet from her. 

The other two girls had been right; Miriam had apparently abandoned the other three remaining members of her alliance. All that remained were Urban, Petra, and Martel, and that fact in itself was not something that seemed long for this world.

A second coyote had its jaws wrapped around Petra’s upper arm, and blood ran profusely down the side of her face. One of her legs seemed to be completely limp and she screamed in pain as the massive coyote ripped its teeth into her flesh. It raked its claws down her back, ripping the fabric of her tank top and soaking the formerly-white shirt with bright red blood. Petra’s dark hair was matted where there had previously been a french braid down the center of her back. 

Urban and Martel were watching in horror, and hadn’t seemed to notice the girls who had climbed towards them. As Georgia followed Pixel onto the ground, the coyote released its teeth from Petra’s arm and made one last bite deep into her neck. With one fluid motion, it yanked out flesh and muscle and sinew from the girl. Petra gave one last agonized scream before collapsing to the ground, and her cannon fired. 

It was as she collapsed that Pixel could see the massive knife Petra had managed to lodge into the coyote’s back, and the mutt seemed to be on its last legs just as much as the girl had been. 

She peered up, and her heart froze as she met the eyes of Urban Fonseca for the first time in what felt like weeks. She was vulnerable now, and the only protection she had was a dagger and two untrained teenage girls who had agreed to ally with her. 

To her great surprise, Urban’s eyes widened in shock as well. As far as tributes went, he looked far better than anyone Pixel had caught sight of yet. While there were splatters of blood dotting his white shirt and a bruise that decorated the left side of his jaw, he otherwise seemed unharmed. It was the look in his eyes that was more shocking than anything.

Urban no longer seemed the cocky, charming boy that had graced the stage in the Capitol so recently. The traces of the kid who volunteered for the Games to make his family proud were gone. Pixel could now see something she’d never expected to glimpse in the eyes of a trained Career from District Two: _fear_. And it wasn't her that he seemed afraid of . 

“ _ Let’s go _ ,” Pixel heard him tell Martel. The boy from Four seemed to be doing nearly as well as Urban, in a physical sense. And his demeanor didn’t appear to have changed all that much, except for a heightened level of skittishness that Pixel could detect from his movements. “We can’t fight right now. We’ll get them later. We’ll find them.”

Pixel pulled the dagger from the side of her backpack and gripped it tight, just in case. Urban didn’t seem willing to fight with the trio at the moment, but she had to prepare for the unexpected. 

“They’re vulnerable,” Martel answered him, his voice fairly high-pitched and clipped with a barely-detectable accent. “We can make this go faster. We’re so close.”

“No,” Urban answered. There seemed to be a tinge of panic in his voice. “No, I’m not… I can’t fight right now.”

“Urban!” Martel looked at him and pulled out the spear that had been slung across his back. “Come  _ on _ . It’ll be easy and quick.”

“ _I just lost my District Partner, Martel!_ ” Urban raised his voice frantically and pointed at Petra’s body. “We’ve known each other since we were  _ children _ _!_ Not right now! You  _ saw _ what happened to Miriam when we moved on too quickly from Praxis.”

Martel dropped the hand holding the spear, and Pixel sensed Georgia releasing a breath of air she’d been holding. “You wouldn’t go crazy like that. That’s not you.”

“It  _ could _ be!” Urban’s voice now sounded clearly across to the three girls. “I want to be done with this as much as you do, but I’m not leaving without my sanity. Give me a night before we go out and murder more kids. We can take care of them tomorrow. I’m sure the Gamemakers will force it sooner or later, anyway.”

Martel’s jaw tightened and he stared steely across to the three girls. Pixel tightened her grip on the knife for a moment, but relaxed when she saw the boy nod. 

“Fine,” he answered. Martel turned around and took several steps away, not speaking anymore. 

Urban looked back at the three girls and made eye contact with Pixel once again. His gaze unwavering and neutral, he simply stared for several seconds before turning around and following his ally away from the scene. 

The remaining girls stood in silence for several minutes, feeling the shock of the situation finally settle in.

“We’re all just kids at the end of the day,” Isadora finally muttered under her breath. She turned away from the grisly scene in front of her and stepped towards a thick collection of tall red trees that stood behind them. 

Before she could take two steps, a parachute fell gracefully down from the sky and landed in front of her. Isadora’s breath hitched and and stopped, and she crouched down to pick up the package. Pixel and Georgia jogged to catch up with her. 

Before either of them could get a look at what was on the note, Isadora had tucked it away into her leggings pocket and moved onto the package itself. As she opened the gift, she gasped silently as she took in the sight of three small, round explosives.

“Those had to ‘ave cost a fortune, Izzy,” Georgia breathed. “You got people behind ya.”

Isadora nodded and drew in a deep breath. It was now that Pixel could see two small tears running down her face. 

“I’m-” she started, then swallowed. “I’m getting out of here, guys.”

Pixel knew what that would mean for herself. But she didn’t say anything back. 

“I’m getting back to District Eleven,” Isadora said. “I have to.”


	23. Chapter 23

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hi friends! Just an early apology for the sheer number of cliffhangers coming up- pretty sure there's one in each of the next three or four chapters, and they're my guilty pleasure! So, sorry (but also, not really that sorry).

Pixel washed her leg in the creek before the trio made camp nearby. The coyote mutt that had attacked before had evidently died of the wounds Georgia inflicted with the crowbar (“I thought it was the weirdest sponsor gift ever right at the starts o' the Games and I hadn’t needed it until that moment,” she explained). They remained outdoors for camp tonight, so that they might make an easy exit in any direction this time around, if necessary.

The socks she had taken off of Praxis’s body earlier in the Games were long enough to wrap around Pixel’s calf, and she ripped them apart into strips so that she could tie them tightly on the wound to try and staunch the bleeding. It didn’t feel particularly useful to Pixel (it hurt no less when she’d wrapped the wound, and there was already blood soaking through the fabric), but it was what she had seen in previous Games, and it was all she knew.

Isadora had remained silent for the rest of the day, mulling over the explosives that she’d stored in the right-hand pocket of her backpack. She had kept the note she’d received secret, only pulling it out to read when she thought Pixel and Georgia weren’t looking, and the other two girls respected her privacy for the moment, despite a gnawing curiosity. 

The three once again took the night in shifts, and Pixel woke undisturbed late in the morning this time. 

Georgia lay back against the rock face as Pixel sat up and winced. Her calf hurt possibly worse than it had the day before, and she grit her teeth as she leaned forward to check on the sock wrappings. She had cut off her leggings just below the knee using the dagger taken from Fara, and could easily see that the makeshift bandages were now coated in dried blood.

“That don’t look good,” Georgia commented softly, wrinkling her eyebrows together. She had pulled her hair down from its ponytail and was combing her fingers through it, and Pixel only now got the image of just how thick, dark, and curly it was. “Pix, you should wash that in the river. Like… right away.”

Pixel nodded and smiled softly. Her family had been the only people ever to nickname her “Pix”, and hearing it from Georgia felt more like a sweet term of endearment than anything she’d heard in the past several weeks. 

She stood slowly, using the rock face as leverage. Her ankle wasn’t entirely healed, but it certainly felt better than the bite wound at this moment. Given the river was only a few yards away from where she had woken up, she figured it should have been easy to make it there, but she found herself holding back tears as she limped towards the water.

The adrenaline of yesterday was to blame for her deceptive productivity the day before, she decided. There was no way, in her current condition, she would be able to run and climb in the same manner as she had earlier. 

With a sigh of relief, Pixel collapsed onto the ground and dunked her leg into the river, not bothering to take off her shoe or sock. Carefully, now that it was submerged, Pixel untied the wrappings and winced again at the sight of the inflamed red wound on her calf. It wasn’t swollen, as she’d expected, but it was certainly ugly, and she had to hold back a yelp as she reached her hand down to clumsily scrub the blood and grime away with her bare fingers. 

“Here,” Pixel turned her head up to see Georgia standing above her with a piece of white fabric. Pixel took it and unfolded to see a clean white t-shirt, then looked back up at Georgia. “I got it at the Cornucopia. Was savin’ it in case I wanted a change o’ clothes or needed some bandages. You need it more’n I do.”

“Thank you,” Pixel breathed and took the shirt, tying it around her leg once she had cleaned it as thoroughly as she could. 

Pixel turned her head back up to Georgia. “Why are you helping me so much? You came back to get me back in the caves, and you saved me from the mutt yesterday. I don’t… I don’t even know if I could have done the same for you. We barely knew each other when we met back up here.”

Georgia smiled and looked over at her. “You ever heard o' karma? It was hammered into my head growin’ up. Basically, if you help others then that same energy is supposed to come back around and help you, too. If I’d’ve left you behind in the cave or to be eaten by the mutt, I was just  _ askin’ _ for some bad energy to come my way.”

“So this is all about… energy?” Pixel laughed softly, a little nonplussed by the answer. “No offense, but it seems… odd. Especially since people tend to forget that kind of stuff in life-or-death situations.”

“No,” Georgia shook her head. “It’s selfish is what it is. I help you, and you’re more likely to help me back. Look, already we’ve used your flint for the first fires I’ve gotten since gettin’ in the arena. If I’d’ve left you behind in the cave, I’d have been left cold and miserable. It’s stuff like that. You might not’ve done the same exact thing for me, but you repay it in your own way. And- if truth be told- I didn’t think that bit in the caves was as dangerous as Izzy thought. She panics much quicker'n I do.”

Pixel sort of understood, but continued washing her leg in silence for a few moments. Georgia took the dirty socks from her and washed them to her best ability in the river, then pointed to the nearest tree, which had several small, spindly branches within reach of the girls beneath the thicker, sturdier ones that climbed higher up the massive length of vegetation. These were the same kind of giant red trees that Pixel had hidden in earlier in the Games, when she’d watched one of the Careers’ first post-bloodbath kills. Funny how the trees were one of the few things that remained unchanged over the past week or so, she thought.

“Let’s hang these to dry on those branches,” Georgia told her. “And, if you don’ mind, I’m gonna bathe in the river real quick. I feel nasty.”

Pixel nodded. “Do you want me to go somewhere else so you have privacy?”

“Hell, no!” Georgia laughed, to Pixel’s surprise. She had left her own windbreaker back with Isadora in camp (who was now building another fire for the trio), and was quickly getting to stripping off her tank top and rinsing it in the river while she dunked herself in the water in just her bra and leggings. “I need a lookout. You saw those two Careers yesterday, they might be comin’ for us today. I ain’t gettin' caught in my underwear.”

Pixel smiled and nodded. “Okay.”

“You got a lot o’ siblings, right? You said in your interview?” Georgia asked. Pixel nodded in response. “Yeah I’ve got a few, too. Privacy ain’t a thing for me and I doubt it’s a thing for you so I don’t give a single damn.”

Pixel traced her eyes over Georgia as the girl dunked her head in the water again, her wet hair straightening and reaching halfway down her back now. The girl had to be sixteen or seventeen, by Pixel’s estimate compared to her own siblings, and Pixel felt a sinking deep in her stomach as she remembered the television program that Sinclair had turned on the night before the Games started. The way the women fawned over Urban and Praxis and Martel had made her feel mildly nauseous, and she now imagined the cameras panning over Georgia’s body, men in the Capitol elbowing each other and making remarks as the screens lingered on her backside and chest. Georgia began peeling her leggings off in the water and Pixel felt a deep panic in her chest, a sudden protectiveness over the girl who had taken her in for no selfish reason except this thing she called “karma”.

“Did I tell you about my private training?” Pixel asked her, knowing the answer but also understanding that the last thing the Gamemakers wanted to broadcast to the world was the possibility of a fourteen-year-old escaping from the Tribute Tower under the noses of the Peacekeepers. She gave it a couple of seconds, hoping beyond hope that the cameras would be cutting away frantically to a more audience-safe topic. 

“No,” Georgia answered, lifting an eyebrow and looking up at her. “Must’ve been damn good if you earned an Eleven.”

“Ten,” Pixel corrected, laughing a little bit. 

“Eleven,” Georgia repeated. “You got the same damn score as that crazy Career girl from One, and you’re only fourteen. That adds another point in my book, so congrats on your Eleven, girl. Now tell me what crazy shit you pulled to earn that.”

“I got out,” Pixel answered, leaning back and propping her right heel up on a rock to let her leg air dry. “I escaped the Tribute Tower, and almost got out of the Capitol.”

“ _ What? _ ” Georgia gasped, standing up straight.

“You  _ what? _ ” 

Pixel whipped her head around to see Isadora standing behind her, her eyes wide as she held a collection of sticks in her arm. 

“I-” Pixel stuttered for a second. She had only intended to tell Georgia, because she was certain that Georgia had her best interests in mind. Isadora, while helpful through the last few days, had not given Pixel that same peace of mind. She hadn’t forgotten that she’d pulled Georgia through the tunnel without her, leaving Pixel behind, alone and injured. But there was no withdrawing what she’d just said. “I escaped.”

“What do you mean you  _ escaped _ ?” Isadora asked, tilting her head.

“From the Tribute Tower, during my private training. That’s why they gave me such a high score,” Pixel explained, her voice getting soft.

“Well that’s just great,” Isadora sighed. “It’s a wonder the Gamemakers have let us last this long if you got into  _ that _ kind of shit before the Games even began.”

“Izzy! It’s just a bit o’ fun,” Georgia responded, wading out of the water, clothes in hand. She hung her garments on the low branches of the tree next to Pixel’s sock bandages. “It ain’t like Pix got anywhere.”

“No, but she  _ tried _ ,” Isadora answered. “They’ll  _ kill _ you for that kind of shit. They’ll kill all three of us if they get the chance.”

“No! The Gamemakers promised-” Pixel cut in but Isadora shook her head. 

“I don’t care what the Gamemakers said. They lie, and I can’t afford to die here,” Isadora said passionately. 

“Well if you’re speakin’ that way, none of us can afford that,” Georgia answered. “You said you were only fightin’ for yourself anyway, Izzy.”

“My _mom!_ ” Isadora yelled. “My niece and nephew, all right!?”

“What?” Pixel asked, knitting her brows together. 

“That’s who I’m going back to! And I don’t need the Capitol tangled up in their business! I don’t know how they’ll survive without me,” Isadora shook her head, turning to walk back to the campsite. Georgia followed her, pulling her wet hair behind her neck with both hands and braiding it down her back quickly. Pixel stood up to follow, wincing again as her leg screamed in pain. 

“You can’t just leave us with that!” Georgia responded, tying the braid into place. “You’ve been shut up for days!”

“My sister died in childbirth, ok?” Isadora told her, kneeling down beside the tiny fire she’d gotten started and adding twigs to the burning kindling. “I’m helping my mom take care of her twins while their dad works in the orchards.”

“Oh,” Pixel breathed. “That’s-”

“Yeah,” Isadora answered brusquely. “I don’t know what would happen to Aster and Thresh if I died. And now the Gamemakers and the Capitol know, too, which was the last thing I wanted. I don't know what the officials will do if they find out my elderly mother is in charge of caring for two infants, and I can't have them going to a community home. So that’s it, ok? And now we’re in trouble because you decided to pull some shit back in the Capitol.”

Pixel slumped down onto the ground, tightening the shirt around her calf. “You’re not in trouble. I am. You and Georgia are probably favorites by this point, and they wouldn’t get rid of audience favorites. They’ll get rid of me sooner or later. If they haven’t taken you out by now then I’m pretty sure they’ll let you stay alive as long as you can.”

Isadora didn’t answer, just gave a soft and uncertain “mmhm,” and tended more to the fire.

So that was it, Pixel decided in her head. Isadora would never trust her, not while she posed a threat to the trio. Not only had her high training score put a target on Pixel’s own back, but the stunt she pulled was now apparently endangering the lives of two other tributes here in the arena, like Pixel had been worried it might all the way back on that day that she’d been caught. 

Georgia looked at her with worry, but said nothing.

She must have thought that way, too, Pixel thought. Isadora made a good point and Georgia wanted to live just as much as the rest of them. They might as well ditch her then and there if they didn’t want to risk the Gamemakers blowing them up on the spot.

The three girls were mostly silent the rest of the day. Georgia caught two more fish in the river and they ate them, but Pixel could sense the awkwardness now brewing, the unrest that the other two probably felt being around her. 

Pixel offered to take first watch. When the other girls were asleep, she decided to finally sate her itching fingers, and she dug carefully into Isadora’s bag and took for herself a handful of nuts, chewing them quietly and bitterly. If they didn’t trust her anymore- if they were probably going to just leave her now, anyway- why bother not taking things for herself? 

She dug into the bottom of Isadora’s bag once again before the end of her shift and took a handkerchief that had been balled up below a pair of heavy mittens. Pixel didn’t need it, but it made her feel better to feed that kleptomania that she’d developed back in District Three, if only a little bit. She stuffed it into the bottom of her backpack, and woke Isadora for second watch.

Pixel slept fitfully through the night, waking often to see if the other two had left her for their own safety. But they never did, and each time she only opened her eyes to see one of them staring up at the night sky or wading through the river or doodling with a stick in the dirt.

Eventually, her body gave out, and she only awoke when a booming voice sounded across the canyon.

_ “Attention tributes of the 60th Hunger Games. This is Claudius Templesmith, your Games announcer. Things have gotten a little… boring here in the arena, we’ve decided. There will be a feast today, down at the site of the Cornucopia. I wouldn’t drink from any of the natural water sources anymore, if I were you. The feast begins at noon. Good luck, and may the odds be ever in your favor.” _


	24. Chapter 24

“Fuck,” Isadora cursed under her breath. “I  _ knew _ it.”

“Well, we refilled our bottles last night,” Georgia reasoned, holding up her twenty-ounce water bottle. “And we’re plenty hydrated right now. How much longer can the Games go? Think we could just wait it out?”

Pixel bit her lip, remembering what it was like to last only two days on a twenty-ounce water bottle in this climate. Her mouth had been parched, and upon finding the water dripping in the cave she’d practically held her head under a stalactite and sucked straight from the cave rock. 

“If it’s any more than one or two days, then we’re fucked if we don’t get more water,” Isadora answered grimly. She tilted her head towards Pixel. “And if her leg looks as bad as it did yesterday, she won’t be any help in getting it.”

Pixel, who hadn’t moved her leg yet, turned her gaze down and pulled off the tarp, which she had been sleeping under. It still felt as bad as the day before, and now that she got the whole look it didn’t seem to appear much better. There was, once again, blood dried into the white t-shirt that had bandaged her calf up, and when Pixel turned it to get a better look she automatically winced in pain. 

“I don’t think I’ll be able to wash out many more bandages, either,” she figured out loud. “If the water’s not drinkable, it’s probably not safe to even step into.”

“Eugh!” she heard from Georgia, who had stepped over to the river. “You’re right about that! River now smells worse’n a sheep turd. It’s brown and nasty and everythin’. Probably get you infected if you stepped in it, Pixel.”

“If I’m not already,” she answered grimly. The bite wound was still red and inflamed, and now seemed slightly swollen, though not as bad as she expected it to look based on how it felt. She looked up at the sky, squinting into the sun. “Do we know what time it is?”

Isadora also looked up and sighed. “No. I just know enough to know that noon is when the sun is at its peak, and I’d wager that’s not for a few hours.”

Georgia followed suit, shielding her eyes with her hand. “Yeah, I’d guess that, too. I-”

She paused for a minute, then held her hand out. 

“Wait,” she breathed. Pixel’s heart started up again nervously, but her spirits lifted when she recognized two small parachutes flying down from the sky. Isadora pointed across the canyon, and Pixel followed the line of sight. There were two or three other small parachutes falling in tandem towards various points in the arena. They all landed out of eyeshot of the three tributes, but Pixel gulped nervously.

“Mentors sending the last sponsor gifts they can afford during these Games, probably,” Isadora explained. “What did we get, G?”

Georgia held two different packages and held one out to Pixel, who noted her name written in neat type on a card across the top. She quickly ripped it open to see another note inside. 

“ _ You’re doing great. Try not to talk about your private training anymore. Wash out your wound. Come back to District Three. We’re looking forward to seeing you. -Sinclair _ ”

Pixel could hear a swishing inside, like liquid. Her heart lifted, thinking that perhaps he’d sent the water that would enable the three of them to avoid the feast, but the bottle she pulled out told her differently. 

Hydrogen peroxide. Probably the cheapest medicinal item she could find back home in District Three, and probably worth a fortune this late in the Hunger Games. And yet, it felt like a lifeline. Before she could bother speaking to her allies she had turned her calf over and was pouring the liquid into her wound. 

As the medicine bubbled and frothed at the touch, Pixel groaned in pain. It didn’t hurt any more than the actual wound while she walked on it, but it certainly wasn’t pleasant, and she worked to grit her teeth and keep herself from making too loud of a noise as she cleaned the wound. The socks she’d washed yesterday appeared at face-level, and Pixel took them, thanking whichever girl had handed them to her. 

After tying her wound back up and feeling marginally better, Pixel glanced up again. Georgia was now holding a shiny new weapon in her hand- Pixel didn’t recognize it, but it seemed to be something that she could slip her fingers into for self-defense. A punch while wearing the metal object would hurt as much as any hit with a club or a crowbar.

“My mentors want me at the feast, I reckon,” she muttered, turning the weapon over in her hand. “If they saved up enough to get me a pair of brass knuckles.”

To Pixel’s surprise, she laughed darkly under her breath. “Must’ve gotten word of what I did to Tanner.”

“What you did to  _ who _ ?” Isadora lifted an eyebrow, sitting back down and leaning against the rock. 

“Tanner, boy that screwed up my life and made me wanna leave District Ten,” Georgia smiled and slipped her fingers into the brass knuckles. “Told me he would marry me, took… everything from me. Left me for someone else after I’d used my savings to…”

Georgia shook her head and began pacing in circles. “Let’s just say he was trouble. I got ‘im out of trouble too many times and in payment he left with someone else. I paid  _ him _ back with a black eye, though.”

Pixel smiled broadly. Somehow she didn’t have a hard time picturing the kind Georgia sending a walloping punch into the eye of a boy who had wronged her. It was a picture she enjoyed; something she herself would have never gotten into. If Pixel had been in that situation, she liked to imagine she would have convened with several siblings, probably broken into his house and stolen some goods, sold it on the black market before it could be traced back to her, and split the spoils with whoever had assisted her. Her brother Linus was not a thief, but he knew how to wield a cute face and talk to buyers in the market better than anyone Pixel had ever met. 

“Anyway,” Georgia sighed, pulling the brass knuckles off her hand and examining them closer. “I guess we don’ have much of a choice, do we?”

Isadora and Pixel sat in silence, then Isadora shook her head. “Let’s leave our items in a safe place for efficiency and speed, take stock of what weapons we have, and get moving as quickly as possible. I don’t want everyone else to have taken the entire stock.”

“Do we know who’s left?” Pixel asked. “By my count, there are only seven tributes left, including us. We have the largest number, I’m pretty sure.”

“Us,” Isadora counted three fingers. “The boys from Two and Four. Girl from One. Who am I missing?”

“Gray,” Georgia answered, sitting down with her allies. 

“Who?” Pixel asked, looking down at her fingernails. Where there had previously been silver polish decorating them, there was now only chipped remains on each finger. She began absentmindedly picking at the remaining polish on her left thumb, feeling a small amount of satisfaction when it came off in one large chunk.

“Boy from Seven,” Georgia answered. “I met him during public training, ‘fore I met Izzy, when I was tryin’ to decide if I wanted an alliance with anyone. He wasn’t wantin’ to talk much.”

“Oh!” Pixel answered, moving onto the next finger. “The angry-looking one. I remember him.”

“Yeah he wasn’t too pleased ‘bout being here and didn’t bother hidin’ it,” Georgia answered. “He was kinda mean to me as well, but more in a grouchy way and less of a ‘I’m gonna hunt you down in the arena’ kind of way, you know, like the Careers kinda felt like.”

Pixel nodded. “So that makes seven. He’s probably alone, and so is Miriam from One. The only other alliance remaining would be the two other boys, then.”

Isadora, who had been digging through her bag, pulled out a rather scary-looking curved knife, then furrowed her brows. “Huh. Could’ve sworn I had a handkerchief in here, too.”

Pixel’s heartbeat quickened for a second, but she didn’t change her expression as she thought about how it now sat in the bottom of her own bag. If she needed it for a bandage replacement in the future, she wouldn’t be able to use it until she had separated from Isadora. That was okay, she decided. 

As Isadora gripped the knife in her hand, Georgia put the brass knuckles to the side and pulled out her crowbar. Pixel grabbed the dagger given to her by Fara as well as the small knife she’d taken from the Cornucopia. The smaller one was all but useless, but it made her feel a little better. 

“Well this is morbid-lookin’” Georgia noted some time later, when they’d eaten their share of Pixel’s beef jerky and some of the tin of nuts in Isadora’s bag (she hadn’t noticed the handful that Pixel had taken last night, to Pixel’s relief). The sun was getting higher in the sky and the girls had hidden their backpacks as thoroughly as they could in the brush and dirt by the river. Each was wielding their weapons (Pixel had decided against the smaller knife in favor of the dagger, and Isadora had pocketed the explosives in her windbreaker), and before their nerves could get the best of them they walked down towards the nearest ladder. 

It took about ten minutes to reach a ladder towards the ground level, and they stayed up in a bush on the second level for the moment to assess the situation. The vulture mutts that had attacked Georgia and Isadora were notably missing from the gargantuan tree now, and the platforms that the tributes had emerged from on day one had been removed. All that stood was the golden Cornucopia, gleaming in the midday sunlight. 

There seemed to be no vegetation in which to hide on the ground level, so the three remained hidden in their spot above for as long as they could, until finally a massive hovercraft appeared from the sky, and down from a net below it poured dozens of plastic water bottles of all shapes and sizes in front of the Cornucopia. 

Before Pixel could react, she noticed a large figure dashing into the center of the arena, recognizing the form of the boy from Seven, Gray. She’d never taken much notice of him before, but his messy hair and his tall and bulky build were unmistakable. He held a sword in his right hand and looked about ready to lop off the heads of anyone in his path.

Georgia held her breath behind Pixel, jerking a little bit in anticipation, but Isadora held her back. 

“We don’t know who’s-” she started before Georgia let out a squeak of surprise. 

Out of seemingly nowhere, a spear came flying through the air and embedded itself in Gray’s shoulder. His yell of agony echoed through the arena and he tumbled down into the dirt. From behind the Cornucopia came Martel with Urban about fifteen feet behind him, and the boys seemed to be in more anticipation of the fallen boy in front of them than the nearby water bottles. 

That was until an arrow came whizzing through the air and pierced through Martel’s skull.

The first cannon sound of the day shot through the arena before Martel had even landed on the ground. Beneath the alliance of the three girls- seemingly only ten feet away from where they sat- little Miriam Opal dashed out towards the center of the Cornucopia. Urban stopped and held his hands up, as if to calm her, to talk to her. Pixel couldn’t make out what he was saying, but Miriam’s piercing, high-pitched voice carried its way to her hiding spot. 

“ _ If you don’t let me grab my water and go I’ll fucking kill you right now! _ ” she yelled at him. He said something to her in what seemed to be a soft voice. In response she held up her bow and arrow and pointed it directly in his face. “ _ I left you idiots for a reason, Urban! I’m not joining you again now that your stupid crony is dead. _ ”

He took a step back and held up the same sword he’d had since decapitating Cable at the bloodbath as he said a few more words to her. 

“ _ Let’s settle this in the finals. That’s what they all wanted to see anyway, right? _ ” she answered him. “ _ I’m the quickest of the whole goddamn group! You’re the strongest! They’ll be talking about it for years. You know what that means for you and your family, and I sure as hell know that too. _ ”

She was talking more lucidly than Pixel had expected for someone who had supposedly gone “crazy” according to more than one source. But she could see the mania in her eyes, the franticness in her movements. It wasn’t obvious, but there was certainly something  _ off  _ about Miriam Opal, especially compared with how composed and charming she had been back in the Capitol. Urban lowered his sword, and this time Pixel could hear him. 

“Go, then!” he yelled. “Take your water and go!”

Miriam lowered her arrow and grabbed the two largest bottles in the pile, which both had plastic handles attached to their lids. With another nod to her former ally, she ran back towards the ladder, up to the second level where the girls hid, past their lucky camouflage, and deep into this level of the cave system.

Urban chewed on his tongue for a bit, scanning the rest of the ground level of the arena- looking for the three girls, Pixel figured- before stuffing his own backpack with five or six bottles of water and running off in a separate direction from their hiding spot.

“Let’s go,” Isadora muttered, and without another word took off out of the bush and down the ladder. Pixel followed immediately behind, with Georgia taking up the rear. 

Isadora and Pixel both reached the depleted pile of water bottles rather quickly, though there still seemed to be plenty in the stock. Pixel shoved a skinny one into her leggings pocket, and another into her windbreaker as Isadora did the same. 

Suddenly, a scream sounded from behind them. 

Pixel and Isadora whipped their heads around to see that Gray from Seven, while down, was certainly not dead. He had slashed his knife down into Georgia’s thigh, and she landed on the ground, her crowbar having skittered out of her hands and across the ground. Pixel dashed away from the pile of water but not before Georgia flipped herself around. 

Gray was pulling himself forward and aiming another stab at Georgia with a heavy grunt, his face contorted in pain and anger. The spear still stuck deep in his shoulder and the arm that was connected to it had fallen limp but he reached forward with his good arm and slashed downwards.

“ _ No! _ ” Georgia screamed.

Sunlight glinted off the brass knuckles as she rolled herself forward and aimed a ferocious fist directly in his face. His knife slashed through the air and missed the girl by inches, and her weapon met his jaw with a sickening crunch. He fell back and she pulled her arm away for a second before bringing it down again, this time onto his nose, which splattered blood directly into her face. 

An agonized groan escaped from his throat and Georgia- who Pixel realized had tears streaming down her face- pulled the knife out of his hand. 

Without a moment’s hesitation she drove the knife deep into his neck, and another cannon boomed across the arena.


	25. Chapter 25

The girls once again took turns keeping guard over camp that night after returning from the feast, and Pixel volunteered to take the last watch for the first time. They didn’t speak much as they returned to their bags which were thankfully still waiting for them in their hiding spots, and Georgia in particular remained quiet, only nodding when agreeing to take second watch. She woke Pixel when the sky was pink and the stars were beginning to fade in the first rays of morning sun. 

If there was anything at all she’d miss about the arena if she ever got out, Pixel decided, it was the stars. 

She glanced up at them the same way she had on one of her first nights here and traced the constellations in her mind, willing back that memory of her father showing her the astronomy book back home. Leo was easy. It was her own, she remembered. Decided by her date of birth. 

It- her birthday- probably had come and gone by now, Pixel realized. She had done an awful job of keeping track of days in the arena. In the past ten years, the Capitol had moved the date of the Reaping from July the Fourth to the second Sunday of July, for whatever reason (most likely, she realized now, for some television scheduling purpose, after she had noted the carefully plotted dates and times of talk shows, and the interviews being on a Friday night when the entire Capitol could be out and at an event like that). There had to have been two weeks that had passed, at the very least, since the Reaping on the fourteenth of July. 

Pixel Delaroux was fifteen. And there was something she couldn’t put her finger on that she hated about that.

“Happy Birthday to me,” she muttered to herself, tracing the number  _ 15 _ into the dirt below her. A somberness filled her chest, a longing for her family waking her up in the morning and singing to her and celebrating her like no other family could. That loneliness grabbed onto her heart like a cold hand in the early hours of the chilly arena dawn.

The other two girls woke when the sun was high, and Pixel had wiped away the number she’d written in the dirt. No need for sentimentality now, she’d decided. They were most likely only a day or two away from the end of the Games, and they would need to prepare. 

They hadn’t talked about what would happen if the impossible were to come true, and they ended up the final three contestants. Pixel certainly wouldn’t stand a chance, she decided. Most likely it would be Isadora coming out on top, for her skill and resourcefulness. Though Georgia would put up a hell of a fight, if yesterday was anything to judge by. 

Georgia’s thigh looked bad, though, from the wound inflicted by Gray. The bleeding had stopped but it didn’t look pretty, and she winced just as badly as Pixel did when she stood on it. Pixel’s own wound looked and felt much better than it had yesterday, but she didn’t give that away. Better to play it up than minimize it, she had decided. 

“Let’s go find a new spot,” Isadora suggested. “Now that the river is useless. I’ll bet that the Gamemakers have something up their sleeve again.”

Pixel and Georgia agreed. And as the trio packed up their belongings for another day in the arena, they heard a sudden rumble, immediately validating Isadora’s prediction. The ground beneath them began to shake, and Isadora’s eyes grew wide as she yelled. 

“Let’s  _ go! _ ”

The three girls ran for the ladder. A collection of dirt and small rocks hit Pixel’s face and she turned her gaze up to see the side of the canyon crumbling above her, the level above them falling into pieces. 

“The canyon’s coming down!” she yelled.

They made their way immediately down to the next level. The crumbling of the canyon hadn’t seemed to make it this far, at least not yet, and they ran across the side of this level for a while trying to avoid disaster. The ground here sloped a bit and ran along the side of the gorge; it was a location that Pixel hadn’t seen before and it thinned considerably as they sprinted as fast as they could (though Pixel and Georgia were each slowed down substantially by their respective leg wounds). 

Earth crumbled behind them and Pixel chanced a look back to see that an entire landslide down to the bottom level had crumbled where they had camped only minutes earlier. They continued to run, and eventually they sensed a sturdiness under their feet, a durability that reassured them that they were, once again, on solid ground.

They were far from safe, though. The girls slowed down to a walking pace and made their way down the path before realizing where exactly the Gamemakers were driving them.

The girls saw Miriam before she saw them. She sat against the side of the rock face, her knees pulled up to her chest as she gazed out towards the massive tree in the center of the arena. Her hair- now pulled into a frizzy knot on the top of her head- was barely holding itself together, with flyaways and full locks of hair falling down the back of her neck. Out of the corner of Pixel’s eye she saw Isadora reaching into her windbreaker pocket, where she still kept the three small explosives from her sponsor gift.

As Isadora moved, Miriam inhaled sharply and whipped her head to the side. Her face- which previously looked empty and distant- was now focused. A determination lit up her eyes as she smiled and pulled herself to her feet with an almost lightning-fast quickness.

Pixel glanced down off the side of the cliff on which they stood, where the ledges below them seemed to drop off immediately towards the ground fifty or sixty feet below them. In this spot there was no safe landing below, no ladder that brought them safely down to the ground in escape from the tousled, tiny girl with fire in her eyes that stood in front of them. 

“Finally!” Miriam yelled, her voice hoarse and tired. “It’s about time I see someone other than my useless  _ fucking _ former allies!”

The three girls didn’t respond, and Isadora slowly adjusted her hand in her pocket. Miriam swiftly pulled the bow off her back and drew out an arrow from the quiver.

“Don’t worry!” she smiled as she began to point the first one in Isadora’s direction. “It’ll be quick. Probably painless.”

Before Miriam could release or anyone else could react, Isadora whipped two small metal balls forward from her pocket and rolled them towards the side of the canyon where Miriam stood. A beeping could be heard, and Pixel realized too late what was going on. 

“ _ Duck! _ ” she ran backwards as the explosive went off. Georgia yelled and Pixel could make out her body flying down to the ground next to her, though she couldn’t see where she had gone in the whoosh of red dust that came along with the explosion. The small metal spheres had been powerful enough to take off a large hunk of the rock wall beside them (though Pixel could no longer vouch for the sturdiness of that rock wall anymore; it may have been about to crumble just like the path behind them) and rocks and dirt were now falling between her and where Isadora and Miriam were facing each other.

Pixel squinted, and though the cloud hadn’t cleared she could see that more of the canyon face had collapsed than she’d thought, and she could no longer see her other ally beyond the pile of rocks and dirt. Miriam was screaming and to Pixel’s relief she could hear Isadora yelling as well. Georgia reappeared in her view and approached the rockslide, dropping her backpack and frantically pulling dirt and rocks away from the pile. 

Panic welled in Pixel’s chest. Her eyes traced to Georgia, then to the pack she had dropped on the ground, and then to her own wound that was once again bleeding through the old bandages. She would be alone sooner or later, she realized. And she didn’t want to see Georgia and Isadora both in the finals. That much she knew for certain. 

Her hand twitched again, that all-too-familiar feeling reaching towards the backpack that her ally had dropped not two feet away from her.  _ She could take it _ , a small voice spoke in her head. Miriam would kill the other two girls easily, Pixel wouldn’t have to be around to watch. They wouldn’t need the goods anyway. Pixel could hide out, stay safe in a secure location until she was forced to face Urban and Miriam in the finals. Urban wouldn’t make her death painful, she was certain about that. And Miriam herself had said that a shot through the head would be sudden and easy. 

Pixel didn’t think. 

She grabbed and ran. Before she could so much as consider what she was doing she threw Georgia’s backpack over her shoulder, turned on her heel, darted away as quickly as she could from the situation before her. She didn’t feel guilt or resentment, only an immediate need to survive. 

And then suddenly she was hit with a weight and was falling to the ground. 

“ _ I don’t think so! _ ” Georgia’s voice appeared in her left ear as she grabbed her around her waist and brought the two crashing to the ground. “What are you  _ doing _ ?”

Pixel was speechless. She hadn’t expected Georgia to be so quick, to catch her so easily. 

“I-” she stammered, her eyes wide and scared. “I was-”

“After everything we’ve done together?  _ Now? _ ” Georgia asked, pulling her backpack away from Pixel and hardening her gaze into her eyes as she stood back up. “We need to be helpin’ Izzy, Pixel! And you’re taking my shit and  _ runnin' _ ?”

Pixel’s throat was closing in panic. She’d only been thinking of her survival, of getting away from a painful death and-

But there was no avoiding the hurt and anger in Georgia’s eyes as she stared at Pixel. Georgia turned her head to the wall of rock that had fallen and exhaled.

“Ain’t getting through to them anyway, I suppose,” she said grimly. She turned her gaze back to Pixel. “You’re stayin’ with me whether you like it or not and we’re figurin’ our way out of this mess.”

“I’m  _ sorry _ ,” Pixel finally got out, her voice having returned to her. She felt a rush of blood to her head. “I didn’t… I didn’t want to have to fight you in the finals. We had to split up eventually!”

“So you took my stuff?” Georgia asked. “What the hell? You coulda left if you really didn’ want to be here. I woulda just let you go! You can’t just take people’s shit right in front of ‘em!”

“It was habit, ok?” Pixel answered, getting to her feet. She knew how red her face had to be now, how guilty and terrible she had to seem. “I’m not a cute, innocent little kid like I’ve been pretending to be!”

“Oh, Pixel, honey,” Georgia laughed a little bit and wiped dirt from her forehead. “Nobody in this damn arena is innocent of  _ anything _ . I’m not and I sure as hell didn’t think  _ you _ were.”

“No!” Pixel refuted. “ _ Before _ the arena, even. I steal shit  _ all the time _ . I can’t even help it at this point. I got overwhelmed and I can’t help it when I’m at home and I didn’t want to see Miriam kill you and I didn’t want to get caught by her and I’m-”

Pixel bit her lip, holding back emotions that were bubbling to the surface.  _ I’m scared _ , was what she would have said if she’d had the guts to verbalize it.

“Pixel,” Georgia’s voice softened. She took a few steps away, towards the edge of the canyon. “I… 

She remained quiet for a minute, pacing near the precipice of the gorge and rubbing her temple with her right hand. “This  _ sucks _ .”

Another silence followed, and a small laugh escaped from Pixel’s throat. Georgia couldn’t have put it any better. It  _ did _ suck.

“You can say that again,” Pixel sighed, looking around the ledge where they stood. Sounds of grunting and a yelp escaped from beyond the rock wall where they’d been cut off from Isadora and Miriam, and Georgia looked worriedly over in the direction, then shook her head.

“Can’t do anything to help, I guess,” she scratched her forehead and wiped away some red dust that had accumulated near one eyebrow. “If I climb up that rock pile it’ll probably collapse anyway.”

She took another couple of steps towards the edge of the canyon so that her toes hung over the crag, and she looked out upon the gorge and the massive tree that stood in front of her. Her face was turned away so Pixel couldn’t see it, but she could have sworn she heard the smallest sob erupt from the older girl. Pixel had never seen her cry, she’d only seen her upbeat, and occasionally angry, but never truly sad, and it was then that the guilt settled deep into her stomach.

Pixel stepped forward, her arm hopelessly outstretched so she might comfort the girl. Georgia turned around to show her face was now clearly streaked with tears.

And then another rumble, similar to what they’d heard only twenty minutes earlier, permeated from the ground beneath them. Pixel felt the earth shake again under her feet- this one much smaller than earlier in the day but certainly just as dangerous- and as she took a step the ground beneath her foot sank three inches deep.

Pixel stumbled forward quickly, not expecting the surface on which she stood to crumble, and as she tripped forward her outstretched hand forcefully landed on Georgia’s bad thigh. The cliffside began to collapse, and Georgia stepped back in pain from the trauma on her leg, yelping and holding her hand out defensively towards Pixel.

Instinctively, Pixel grabbed it just as Georgia stepped off the side of the canyon. 

Rocks tumbled several stories below them, crashing into pieces as they hit the ground. Pixel’s sweaty hand clung to Georgia’s and suddenly the other girl was falling down below her and Pixel’s hand was holding hers and her arm was nearly yanked out of her socket as Georgia’s fall was halted. And suddenly Georgia was hanging beneath her and screaming as loud as she could while she clung desperately to Pixel as more rocks quickly tumbled to the ground around them.

“ _ Georgia! _ ” Pixel yelled, panicked and tightening her grip on Georgia’s hand as well as she could. “Climb back up!”

Georgia clawed desperately at the earth in front of her, but it gave way as easily as if it were sand. This bizarre Gamemaker bastardization of earth was no help, crumbling at Georgia’s touch as she shrieked in fear whenever she tore her fingers into the ground and felt it disintegrate at her touch. 

Soon it became clear that her efforts were fruitless. Pixel would have to pull her up, and Pixel certainly did not have the strength nor the purchase on the ground beneath her to do that. In fact, she was now slipping forward as well, pulled by the weight of the girl she was holding onto. 

“Don’t… I think… I think you’re going to have to let me go, Pix,” Georgia cried despondently at her, tears streaming down her face. She certainly didn’t  _ look _ like she wanted Pixel to let go, and Pixel looked down at her and saw only futility. Georgia looked down at the fall beneath her and shook her head. “I’m not gonna make it. And I’m  _ not _ takin’ you with me!”

“ _ No! _ ” Pixel screamed back, realizing now that her eyes had blurred from her own tears. “I can’t be alone in this!”

As she yelled that, she realized it was true. She had tried to run away, to be alone for the rest of the Games, but she couldn’t. Georgia had taken care of her, had pulled her into a group that probably kept her from going insane like what had happened to Miriam. And, perhaps selfishly, she knew that she was the cause of the situation. She didn’t know if her soul could handle being behind another innocent person’s death. Not after the despair that she still felt in her conscience after Fara.

“Find Izzy! You guys can do this!” Georgia yelled, dust now pulling into her windpipe and making her voice scratchy and hoarse. Pixel shook her head. If Isadora made it out of this alive, Pixel would be to blame for the death of her truest ally. There would be no returning. All trust would be lost for good. 

“I need  _ you _ , though!” Pixel yelled in response. “I can’t do this without you!”

Georgia shook her head as she sobbed mournfully. “You’re going to have to! Please… please don’t make me wait longer than I need to.”

“ _ No! _ ” Pixel screamed once more. 

But Georgia was not to be persuaded. She understood the triviality of waiting while Pixel held tight onto her. Georgia gave one last look up at Pixel. Then she released her own grip and slipped away through Pixel’s palm, down to the bottom of the gorge as Pixel screamed for her friend.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Whoops, sorry!


	26. Chapter 26

Pixel ran. She’d pulled herself up and looked away as Georgia fell, not wanting to see the scene below her, and sprinted as fast as her wounded leg would carry her back towards the rockslide she had escaped that very morning. 

Eventually she slipped, and as she hit the rockslide she slid down the steep slope, hitting her body on rocks as she tumbled down further into the canyon. 

She was on the second level of the gorge when she stopped sliding, and she tasted blood in her mouth and felt red dirt coating every bit of her body, but she didn’t care. She could hardly see, as the tears had not stopped coming since she’d failed her friend.  _ Murdered _ her friend.

“ _ Fuck! _ ” she screamed at the top of her lungs, letting the anguish fill her body as she brought her fists down onto the ground like a small child. 

Suddenly, she couldn't stop screaming. Pixel Delaroux had been quiet and tame her entire life. Certainly, she couldn’t remember the last time she’d thrown a tantrum or melted down. When she was upset at home, she would vent to her sister Vista, perhaps cry quietly, and get over it so she could help with chores. 

Now, for the first time she could fathom, she was screaming and punching, pulling things out of her backpack and throwing them while her anguished cries filled the air around her. The flashlight she’d received at the beginning of the game went flying into the rock face, and its plastic body shattered on the hard surface. She pulled out the dagger and stabbed it into a tree several times, ripping into the soft bark and leaving it there as she grabbed her nearly-empty bag of trail mix and slammed it to the ground.

She didn’t know what she was doing. Her head wasn’t on straight, nothing was rational right now and nothing had to make sense. Pixel just wanted her life back to normal, wanted to return to District Three and pretend like none of this had ever happened, as if she’d had a choice in the matter in the first place. 

And then, as quickly as it had come on, the meltdown ceased.

Pixel collapsed to the ground in exhaustion, then took out one of the water bottles she hadn’t thrown from her backpack. Without thinking she downed the entire bottle, then reached for another. And she felt better, if only marginally, as she settled down against a portion of the cliff that hadn't collapsed. 

During her tantrum, Pixel had not noticed that the sky had darkened. It was barely the afternoon, probably one or two o’clock at the latest, and as she drank from the next bottle of water she glanced upwards quizzically to see that thick, heavy clouds were now covering the previously clear sky. 

It was about an hour before the first drop hit, but when the rain began, it was an immediate downpour. Pixel had fallen asleep for a quick nap, overcome with exhaustion, when she woke and realized she was being soaked to the bone. 

She stood and looked up to see the clouds above were now moving rapidly, and then jumped in surprise as she saw a crack of an immense lightning bolt shoot across the sky accompanied by the roar of the loudest thunder she’d ever heard. In minutes another lightning shot down from the sky onto a ledge on the other side of the canyon, and Pixel watched as a massive tree was set ablaze by the lightning, then slowly toppled down, falling to the ground on its level and then tipping over and tumbling down to the bottom floor of the arena. On its way down it hit another, smaller tree and took that one with it like a domino. 

Another lightning bolt, this one on this side of the canyon, and another tree came falling to the ground only fifty feet from where she stood. 

Pixel understood. This was the end, and if she didn’t get to the ground level of the arena, she was practically a standing lightning rod in place. 

She pulled the dagger from the tree and sprinted over to the nearest ladder, climbing down to the bottom of the canyon one last time as lighting cracked once more, this time hitting the massive dead tree in the center. Several gray branches ignited and fell to the ground, and lighting hit once more, this time mere feet from where Pixel had stood thirty seconds earlier. 

It was coming unnaturally fast, and Pixel could see several bolts hitting spots of the arena simultaneously, taking trees and rocks down and forcing the entire arena to crumble and implode on itself. 

And running towards her, from two opposite ends of the arena, Pixel could see two final forms approaching.

Urban was no surprise, and he looked about as dirty as she was. His face was caked in mud that was quickly washing away in the storm, as if he’d fallen into a landslide during the current downpour. His sword was strapped to his back and he seemed to have abandoned all of his other supplies; his windbreaker was also gone and his white t-shirt clung to his chest in the rain, the black athletic pants that were part of the boys’ costume now ripped and raggedy.

To Pixel’s astonishment, it was not Miriam Opal that came dashing towards her from the other end of the arena, but Isadora. She did not look well. Her face had been slashed from left to right and her nose looked broken. She clutched her left arm closely, as if it was in a large amount of pain. 

“Where’s Georgia!?” she yelled towards Pixel, her eyes wide. The betrayal was already written across her face, if Pixel’s gut was anything to go by.

Pixel said nothing, but closed her mouth and shook her head. A tree trunk landed ten feet from her and she yelped in surprise, but still did not offer an answer to Isadora. 

Urban stepped forward and pulled his sword out of the sheath on his back. “Okay ladies. I’m sorry it’s come to this-”

“So am I!” Isadora yelled back at him. She held her own curved knife in her right hand, and maneuvered her injured left arm so that her hand could fit in the pocket, where Pixel presumed she still had one explosive handy. Another heavy branch of the tree in the center landed beside the trio, and Pixel saw another tree trunk land close to her in her peripheral vision. She glanced around desperately, noting just how many elements were falling and piling up.

Before anything could happen to her, Pixel darted away, into a pile of fallen brush and tree and bark and twisted herself through so that only her small body would be able to fit. The other two would have to fight it out first, she would make sure of that.

Suddenly she heard the  _ clang _ of metal-on-metal, and peered through the fallen branches to see that Urban had already charged at Isadora, and Isadora had answered him by parrying his blow with her knife. She was more skilled than Pixel had expected, and the two began a suspenseful dance of slashes and dodges. Urban clearly had the upper hand; he was in much better shape than Isadora, but she was determined, and easily scooted around blows that should have been lethal.

Isadora got a jab in his thigh and he yelled out in pain, then brought his sword down and slashed at her ankle. It met its target and Isadora hit the floor, rolling away from his next blow. A small branch landed beside the two and Isadora grabbed it and threw it at Urban. It hit his face and he yelled and grasped at his right eye. 

In response he stepped forward and landed a kick in Isadora’s stomach. She doubled over in pain, then yelled something unintelligible at him. He kicked her again, forcing her to be splayed on the ground, and then kicked the knife out of her hand and said something Pixel couldn’t make out to her.

Pixel didn’t hear a response, but ducked her head away when he raised his sword once again. 

The sound wasn’t loud over the rain and the thunder, but Pixel was certain of what she heard when Urban’s sword made its way through Isadora’s chest. The cannon confirmed it, and Pixel let out a pained exhale when she looked back up to see her former ally dead on the ground.

“Pixel!” Urban called out into the air.

He didn’t seem to have seen where she had gone, and his call wasn’t thrown in one particular direction. But Pixel was paralyzed at the moment with fear. 

“Get out here, let’s just… get this over with,” he pleaded, holding his hand to his eye once again. As he turned his back Pixel found her bearings and ducked into another crawl space within the fallen tree trunks. More trees and branches and debris fell around her, at an almost rapid pace, and she found herself staring at the sky and dodging them more than she did for the boy out to kill her. 

Urban turned once again so that Pixel felt confident he wouldn’t see her, and she pulled out of the pile of trees where she hid and darted towards another one. Her wounded leg, however, had something else to say entirely. 

As she ran towards a separate pile of tree trunks her shabbily bandaged calf scraped against a scratchy gray branch. The bandage caught on it, and Pixel yelped involuntarily as she came falling to the ground. 

Urban whipped around, meeting her eyes and sighing. 

“I’m sorry I have to do this!” he yelled at her as she gripped the dagger in her right hand. She shook her head, not wanting to go down without a fight. But her leg was still caught in the branch, and she reached her left hand down to untie the makeshift bandage so that she could be free. 

“Don’t!” she yelled, pleading with her smallest voice. “Please! We can-”

As quickly as she could, she darted away from him, blood streaming down her leg. But she was essentially trapped. The tree trunks that had fallen had formed a relatively neat circle around the huge, dead tree, and there was no escape unless she wanted to fight her way into another pile. Certainly if she did that, anyway, the Gamemakers would devise something else to drive her back to Urban. They wanted a final fight.

Pixel stopped and turned back towards him. Her eyes grew wide, as they had back in the Capitol whenever she was trying to convince anyone that she was young and small and innocent. But at this moment, she realized, she wasn’t trying to convince anyone. That’s who she was. The little girl from Three, about to fall under the massive sword of the boy from Two who was quickly approaching her. 

“Please, Urban!” she yelled at him, her voice breaking as tears fell down her face and mingled with the heavy rain. “ _ Please _ don’t!”

But he was approaching anyway, and the sword was gleaming in his hand, and Pixel had no escape. 

She thought back to her escape from the Tribute Tower, how she had nearly made it out of the Capitol and back home. The Gamemakers had threatened her family and her mentors. They’d said if she didn’t go into the arena, those who cared for her would be the ones to suffer.

Pixel didn’t know if it was worth it, now that she was standing and facing her own death at the hands of a teenage boy. She could have escaped. She could have done it and lived in the woods and been peaceful and happy her entire life. 

But she would have been alone. And if there was one thing she never wanted to be again, it was alone. 

Urban was taking his time, and Pixel hated it. It was clear from the look on his face that he didn’t want to go through with the act, didn’t want to kill the little girl in front of him, but he had no choice. The two of them had that mutual understanding at the very least. Pixel looked up.

Another crash of thunder and lightning streaked across the sky. The center tree was hit again, and more branches fell. Urban followed her gaze upwards, and Pixel looked back down at him. More thunder and lightning. Then more. 

Urban’s eyes grew wide in shock and fear for a brief moment. 

“Pixel!” he yelled. “Pixel,  _ move! _ ”

Before Pixel could react, Urban Fonseca had dropped his sword and tackled her to the ground. Something heavy fell on top of them and Pixel heard a pained grunt. As more and more and more thunder and lightning struck, larger branches fell and Pixel understood immediately what was happening. 

The gray tree was coming down in pieces around them. And as Urban tackled her to the ground and covered her with his body, branches and pieces of trunk and wood and rocks and dirt and more debris than Pixel could imagine piled on top of the two. 

But Pixel couldn’t see the half of it. As she fell to the ground, she felt her head strike something hard. And suddenly, buried under a boy and a pile of debris, Pixel’s vision went black.


	27. Chapter 27

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hi! As we go into this chapter, I wanted to add a couple of extra trigger warnings- it's kind of a hard chapter even though it's one of the shortest in the whole fic so I just want to give a head's up.
> 
> If any of the following things are triggering or panic-inducing for you, I would recommend skimming forward to the sentence/paragraph that goes "It was useless."
> 
> -Being buried alive  
> -Suicidal ideation  
> -Blood  
> -Asphyxiation
> 
> Also, as we go into the last few chapters of the fic, thanks again so so much for reading my little pet project!! Pixel and her story has truly kept me sane through quarantine and unemployment and everything. I've updated this story every Monday for the last few months and it's honestly given me something to look forward to every week. 
> 
> For those interested in my next story- I'll give you a little blurb about it! I recently got a job again (FINALLY), so the updates on that one will appear on Sundays I think, so I don't have to worry about getting it posted on Mondays while I work. The story is going to focus on a seventeen-year-old tribute named Ampere from District Five during the 61st Games (you can tell I like to have fun with district-themed names). She's precise, brilliant, and constantly angry at those who have done her wrong. While the story will be focused on her, other characters such as her mentors, her District Partner, and other tributes are going to be more thoroughly explored than they have in this one, and there may or may not be a little bit of romance. The fic will be called Pariah.

It was only a few seconds. 

Something else fell, and Pixel’s consciousness returned. Her head was spinning and she couldn’t tell which way was up and which way was down, especially because there was so little light where she lay. Until eventually a drop of rain hit her cheek, and she could just barely begin to realize what was going on through the confusion and dizziness and vertigo. 

Urban was on top of her, his breath coming through in strained and difficult inhales. He coughed, and Pixel was hit in her neck by a spray of something she couldn’t see.

“Urban,” she muttered. “Urban, why did you do that? What happened?”

Urban coughed again in response, his breath shuddering. Lightning streaked through the crevice in the pile of debris above them and Pixel realized that the drop of rain that had hit her cheek was not rain at all, but blood dripping from an open wound in the back of Urban’s head. 

“I don’t know.”

Pixel sighed in relief when he answered her. He was well enough to speak, at the very least. Perhaps the two of them could get out of this mess. He had certainly proven himself strong enough earlier. But she could feel his entire weight on top of her body, limp and unmoving. 

“Instinct, I think,” Urban breathed, his voice coming through weaker than it had only seconds ago. “My little-”

He coughed again, and Pixel knew for sure that this was now his blood coating her neck and falling down onto her shoulders and chest. 

“My little brothers,” he tried to explain.

“Stop!” Pixel shook her head as best she could from where she was trapped. She pushed on his shoulders in an attempt to wiggle something free, but he didn’t move. “Don’t use your strength to talk, help me get us out of here!”

“That branch hit my neck, Pixel,” Urban answered, his voice now quieted down to barely a whisper. “I’m not going anywhere. I-”

His next cough was frail, and Pixel understood. He’d dove at her to get her out of the way of a falling branch, just as he would have done for his little brothers. And that branch hit him in his neck. 

Pixel had seen men and women who were involved in major factory accidents back in District Three, probably more often than she should have. More often than not they were missing fingers or limbs, but when the warden gave her the safety briefing on her first day at the touchscreen plant, one of his warnings had come in loud and clear. 

That particular warden’s receptionist was a quadraplegic. She’d been involved in a bad factory accident, stuck her head in a machine to get a better look at what had gone wrong, and when the machine turned back on, she hadn’t pulled back quickly enough. A piece of equipment had fallen onto her neck, and now her legs and arms were all but useless. The warden had felt so bad he put her in a position where all she needed to do was be able to talk to people coming in asking for a job. 

But even that receptionist had been able to talk without spitting blood from her mouth. Pixel doubted she had had an open wound on the back of her head that was now losing more and more blood. And Pixel knew for certain that she had not been trapped indefinitely under a pile of branches and debris that would be all but impossible for a single person to climb out of.

“Urban,  _ please! _ ” she pleaded with him one last time, as if he could possibly do anything about the predicament they had been left in, as if the boy hadn’t already saved her life on impulse just a minute earlier. “Urban,  _ don’t leave me like this! _ ”

The boy did not respond. Pixel realized tears were once again streaming down her own face, and she felt that same rush of panic welling up in her chest. 

“ _ Urban, no! _ ” she pushed at him desperately, moved her arms to her sides to try and pull something loose, get anything free, but nothing was budging. “ _ Get off! Get out! Please! _ ”

“ _ Help me! _ ”

And then she had lost her words and was simply screaming. Urban was no longer moving. If a cannon had fired for him she wouldn’t have been able to hear, the only thing that filled her ears was her own desperate and hoarse cry for help. 

And when they couldn’t come anymore, when her voice had worn itself out, Pixel laid back under the dead boy and the pile of rubble and let herself cry. And cry. It felt like she was crying for hours when she got a pang in her stomach.

This was it. She realized it now. There would be no victor of the 60th Hunger Games. They never would have let it be her, anyway. After the escape attempt, the blatant defiance of the Gamemakers and the Capitol, the miracle of living over a week in the arena against all odds, Pixel Delaroux was destined to remain buried alive under the corpse of the boy who should have won. 

In the same crevice from which she saw lightning illuminate the sky earlier, Pixel now saw the rainclouds suddenly dissipating, blowing away unnaturally just as quickly as they had come. 

But that was it. 

And she lay there, eyes closed, tears falling down her face, and waited.

And waited.

Was this the worst possible way to die, she wondered? Most likely it would be dehydration within a couple of days. She swallowed down the panic that began to once again build in her body. There was enough oxygen coming in, she figured, that she wouldn’t suffocate, but perhaps, if it got bad enough-

Could she do it to herself? Maneuver the dead body above her and her windbreaker to cut off her own air supply so she wouldn’t have to wait for her body to give out?

She contemplated it, and the very idea made her chest hurt and the desperation she had to live cut deeply into her soul. No. No, she wouldn’t kill herself.

Pixel wriggled herself a little more, and this time managed to get her right arm free to get hold of a branch. She tried to pull herself out from under the body, into a little bit more purchase, but her strength had been all but sapped from her body. She was pinned. She was stuck.

It was useless. 

She closed her eyes once again.

And then a sound came from above.

Pixel’s eyes shot open and she heard a light whirring that grew louder and louder. And then it became thunderous and it was accompanied by a shuffling and some voices, and somehow the first conversation by people not subjected to a chaotic battle royale of teenagers was sweeter than any music she'd ever heard in her life .

Once again, Pixel began to cry. And this time, it wasn’t of desperation or of helplessness. 

Debris was lifted and more sun came peeking through. Weight was lifted off of Urban’s corpse and the full impact of late afternoon daylight hit Pixel’s face and then she could see the bright white uniforms of Peacekeepers and then Urban’s body was lifted off of her own and a hand was reaching towards Pixel herself.

Pixel lifted her freed hand and grabbed the glove reaching towards her as she sobbed deep, strained tears of relief through her hoarse vocal chords.

A Peacekeeper picked her up by her waist as if she was no heavier than a doll, and she knew in her heart it was good because she could not hold herself up if she tried. They set her down on the damp, red earth besides the ladder that was now hanging from the hovercraft and Pixel collapsed onto the ground, holding her face in her hands as she weeped and released everything from her soul that no child should have been capable of carrying.

Nobody touched her. There were no caring arms of a parent or gentle touch of a sibling to tell her everything was going to be alright. Pixel was going to have to do that herself. 

She opened her eyes, stared at the ground below her, and took a deep breath. Pixel stood on her own two feet once more (wincing slightly as a shot of pain returned to the bad ankle she’d thought she’d recovered), and before she could turn to grab onto the ladder that would pull her out of the arena, a voice boomed across the tattered, ruined canyon.

“ _ Ladies and gentlemen. I am proud to announce the winner of the 60th Annual Hunger Games, Pixel Delaroux! _ ”


	28. Chapter 28

The Capitol doctors on the hovercraft told her she had suffered a bad concussion, and in her left ankle there was now a small fracture that they had tied up tightly with several layers of gauze. Pixel would be walking on crutches for a few weeks, they’d explained, and those would be given to her back in the Capitol along with the actual cast for her leg. The bite from the coyote mutt was even deeper than she’d thought, and though the doctors had commended how thoroughly she’d rinsed it with hydrogen peroxide, there was still some work to be done, so they injected her with mysterious antidotes and instructed her to change the bandages every day until there was no more blood or pus on them. 

Pixel had not expected to cry again when she saw her mentors appear after the doctors had left. Amity was not here, Beetee explained, since she didn’t like flying, but she would be giving her congratulations back in the Capitol. Wiress had given her a nervous hug, and immediately set to fixing Pixel’s ruined bun, pulling it out of the ragged hair tie and beginning to braid it back. 

She didn’t get far before Sinclair had picked Pixel up and twirled her around in the biggest hug she’d ever felt from a single person. Tears had already been falling down her face but she now yelled in relief as she clutched the fabric of his shirt. 

“Thank you!” she gasped to him while he put her back down on the makeshift hospital bed. She turned to Beetee and Wiress, too. “Thank you, thank you so much. I wouldn’t have-”

“Don’t you dare thank us,” Sinclair stopped her. “No politeness needed, no pleasantries. We’re just really fucking glad that you’re alive, Pixel. We’re… we’re so relieved.”

It was now that Pixel realized he had tears in his eyes as well. 

Wiress got back to braiding Pixel’s hair and Pixel leaned back towards her. 

“There’s some light food on the hovercraft,” Beetee noted. “You’ve lost a considerable amount of weight in the arena and it’s going to be a task to get you healthy again. It’s important you don’t eat too much when you’re back in the Capitol, not right away.”

Pixel’s stomach growled in response, and within seconds an Avox was at her side with an apple and a bread roll. She picked them up, remembering that moment in the arena where she had wished for just this: being waited on hand and foot, treated like someone who mattered, given access to luxuries like the other Capitolites. A metallic taste filled her mouth but she took a bite from the roll and sighed involuntarily before taking another ravenous bite. 

It was not a long hovercraft ride, just as the ride towards the arena hadn’t been, and when Pixel arrived she was picked up by another group of Capitol doctors who hurried her away to a sterile white room somewhere in the Tribute Tower. They stuck her with more needles, and before Pixel could think anything else she had drifted off to sleep.

Pixel pulled in and out of the drug-induced unconsciousness what felt like a dozen times, and when she finally fully awoke the attending nurse told her that it had been two full days since she’d been lifted from the arena. Her head was light and fuzzy, and when she couldn’t quite verbalize how she felt, the nurse explained that most victors coming straight out of the arena needed a good amount of “happy” drugs just to make it the first few days out. She would stay a few more days, she was told, until the doctors had ensured that there were enough nutrients back in her body to be certain she was healthy again.

Her mentors visited often, besides Amity again (Sinclair told her that the one thing she hated more than flying was the hospital), and gave her tidbits of the world, sneaking in bites of food and- in Wiress’s case- redoing the braids in her hair again. When they left, that sinking feeling of loneliness would hit Pixel once again until the nurse administered another shot of anesthesia.

Her most surprising visit came about an hour after her mentors had left one day. Pixel had turned on a silly Capitol show, a fictionalized comedy that held not even a mention of the Hunger Games, when the door to the hospital room opened. Expecting it to be a nurse, she blinked in surprise to see the form of Cecelia.

She looked exactly the same as she had when Pixel had met her before the Games, though her dark hair was pulled into a tight bun on the top of her head, and she wore a pair of large wireframe glasses. On her right arm was a large tote bag.

“Mind if I come in?” she asked. “I, uh… just wanted to chat.”

Pixel nodded. “Sure thing.”

Cecelia smiled gently and entered, taking a careful seat on the edge of Pixel’s bed. 

“I brought a present,” she said as she sat the tote bag next to the bed. “They do the best job in the world of patching up your body here, but your soul needs a little more time. Another victor did this for me last year, and I wanted to pass it forward.”

“Can I?” Pixel asked as she reached for the bag. Just from looking at the top there seemed to be a couple of books, and some baggies filled with other things inside.

“Of course,” Cecelia nodded.

Inside were several items: the first and most surprising was a black-and-white picture book with a set of colored pencils attached. Pixel raised an eyebrow and looked back up at Cecelia. She’d had coloring books in school as a child, and was sure she hadn’t seen one in about ten years.

“You know I  _ am _ a teenager, right?” she asked, trying to still sound thankful. She smiled and laughed a little. “They didn’t send a five-year-old into the arena.”

“I know!” Cecelia held her hands out in defense. “This is a little more involved than the princess-y ones. It’s got patterns and really detailed things for you to fill in, and it’s actually really relaxing. I use them all the time, even now, when I’m feeling stressed.”

Pixel returned it to the bag, doubtful that she would ever actually get around to using it, and pulled out a couple more things, including a novel that looked familiar.

“That’s what I was reading when we met on the night of the parade,” Cecelia clarified. “It’s just a fun little fiction book, and it reminded me of you so I thought it might be nice.”

The rest of the items were things like chocolates and stress balls, a clay substance that Cecelia said went on her face and was supposed to be good for her skin, and a plush bear. It was all very soft and soothing, and it warmed Pixel’s heart a little to see that someone she barely knew had gone so far out of her way to deliver a care package to her. 

“Thank you,” Pixel smiled. “This… means a lot.”

“Of course,” Cecelia answered. “I, um… I hope you’re okay. And I’m here to talk if you need.”

“Sure,” Pixel nodded, thinking that Cecelia would get up to leave, but she didn’t. She bit her lip briefly, then turned back to Pixel.

“Both of my tributes died in that fire,” she said calmly. “The one where you helped that girl from Five?”

_ Helped _ . Pixel winced at the thought.

“I didn’t help,” she shook her head. “I ki… I killed her.”

“She was dying, anyway,” Cecelia assured with a solid tone to her voice. “You spared her suffering. And I wanted to say that that was a really brave thing you did. And… while my tributes died, you helped their ally, who was kind to them. Fara and Hiram and Gwen… didn’t deserve that at all, and neither did you. But you did the right thing. So… thank you for that.”

Pixel chewed on the inside of her lip, not meeting Cecelia’s eyes. It didn’t feel like the right thing to have done, even now as she sat here alive and well.

“Thanks,” she answered softly. 

Cecelia gave her a pat on the shoulder and recommended the coconut caramel cookies in the tote bag before standing up and saying goodbye. As she left the doorway, a nurse entered with another syringe of drugs, and within minutes, Pixel was drifting away once again on morphling.

It was another day before she was allowed to leave the hospital. She was clear-headed, finally, and leaned on another nurse while she was fitted for crutches. 

Pixel figured an avox would be instructed to bring her back to the District Three suite, but the most unexpectedly pleasant surprise came when Lael Lu, her own escort, arrived at the door. Her sleek black hair was pulled back in a ponytail away from her face, and she wore a hot pink dress with huge, sculpted shoulders and a billowy skirt that reached her knees. It was ridiculous, but it was somehow familiar, and Pixel smiled in welcome to the escort.

“Everyone  _ loves _ you!” Lael gushed, typing a few messages into the phone in her hand. As Pixel hobbled along beside her on crutches, Lael offered to assist but found herself awkwardly fumbling around and useless, so she simply pulled Pixel’s hair out of her face and squeezed her shoulder while holding Cecelia’s tote bag on her left arm. “You’re the absolute  _ darling _ of the Capitol, hun, and I cannot  _ wait _ to get to show you off!”

Just as Beetee had said, Amity was waiting for her arrival at the door to the suite. As Lael brought Pixel in, Amity pulled her down into a massive hug and remarked on how the girl needed to eat something right away, snapping at the nearest Avox to grab some hot chocolate and stew for her. 

“Nothing to do until tomorrow,” Sinclair stood from his seat on the couch, where Pixel hadn’t seen him lounging. “If you need to sleep in a bed, or have some time alone-”

“No!” Pixel jumped a bit at the idea, then shook herself back to normal. “Sorry, no, I… don’t want to be alone. I’d love some more food. What… um, what’s that thing that Amity just ordered for me?”

“Hot chocolate,” Wiress answered with a smile. “You’ll like it a lot. It has whipped cream.”

Wiress was right. When the drink came out, along with the stew, Pixel took a hesitant sip, then smiled and took another, being careful not to drink too fast to avoid burning her tongue.

And then the first vision hit. _The heat emanating off Fara, the burns covering the girl’s face and body, her hair singed off only inches from the scalp. Pixel driving her dagger into-_

Pixel set her drink down and winced. 

“Sorry,” she muttered. “It’s hot.”

“Oh boy,” Sinclair murmured. He took a few steps away and stroked his hand through his beard with a distressed look on his face, then looked knowingly at Beetee. He didn’t say a word, though, and instead walked forward and helped Pixel to a comfortable armchair in front of the television. 

The night was spent in comfortable silence, in the warm suite with the other victors gathered around her. They put on an old movie and got popcorn and soda and Wiress combed and braided and re-braided Pixel’s hair.

When it was bedtime, Wiress followed Pixel to her room, to her great relief, and sat on the edge of the bed, telling her little stories that had been told to Pixel by her parents, revisiting fairy tales and folklore of their home district. It was not unlike Cecelia gifting her a coloring book, but there was warmth and comfort and care and after the ordeal of the Games Pixel was not going to say no to the caring company.

In the plush down sheets and the warm bed, Pixel drifted off to her first safe and unmedicated sleep in weeks, letting the dulcet tones of Wiress’s stories lull her into restful slumber.


End file.
